Just An Old Fashioned Lady

Thank god, I lean into the chiller cabinet and this makes me feel better. It was hot and dusty on site and close as hell in the dell, where I lost my virginity. The small shop in Goring where I stand staring at cold sausage rolls, provides an odd moment of relief to a crazy morning. I didn’t drive through that village and past the house where I had my first sexual encounter on purpose – I know this because the satnav had thrown me a dummy and I’d been gloriously lost for half an hour, touring single track lanes in blazing sunshine – but suddenly there I was.

The house was like the one in The Time Machine at 100 years from ‘present’, boarded up with broken windows to the upper floors. A large fir tree had collapsed onto the lawn which had overgrown the shingle drive. I saw the boarded opening to the basement where this boy became a man and, no one coming, I stuffed the brakes on. Whatever was going to happen next, this place was on the verge of changing beyond recognition so I did what anyone would and reached for my camera. Nothing wrong with a couple of snaps, a small memento of a very special time.

Stupid camera, I thought, focusing on the twigs in the hedge instead of the house beyond. The drive used to be up here a bit, a gap in the hedge, there was a stone with the house number on it and a gate...oh, no gate. Heck, no one about, I’ll just step into the garden and get a good shot of the old place.

I loved this house, I still think of some aspects of layout and design when I plan the house I’d like to live in one day. I first visited when the double height extension had just been built, with the double garage undercroft. You still had to step over a radiator marking the old external wall to get into the new bit, it was zany, I was in love, and I loved it.

Once in the garden, a legitimate boundary had been crossed, the hairs stood up on my arms, despite the heat, and the blood started to whoosh in my ears. Here is the strange lamp post, like Narnia, and over there the monkey puzzle tree where we sat having tea shortly before setting off in our Landrover, for Africa. Over by the garage there was an inspection pit, where my girlfriend’s brother played mechanic under his little Lancia and there was the back door. There was the back door...

Stepping through the back door into the kitchen, I was no longer really sane. The past erupted out of the walls and up through the floor leaving unrecognisable detritus everywhere. A strange pile of what looked like sawdust but could be puke, or a giant fungus, occupied the centre of the floor. The coloured glass window through to the dining room was missing but the poppy painted tiles and red ceramic sinks were just as they were thirty years ago.

Through the opening to the dining room I could see the 1970s silver wall paper. I sat staring at this while my girlfriend’s moody mother once interrogated us, “I can see that you’re both unhappy,” she said. She was supposedly a child psychologist, I was dumbfounded.

Drawn into all of this, seemingly without a say, and remembering that all was not unadulterated happiness in this house – once her mother said the dell, which was a quarry, gave her headaches because it collected positive ions – I stayed put in the kitchen.

I gave her daughter a baby which had to be taken out, because we were too young. Then this house became a forbidden place to me and now, out of the blue, I was back in it, and for a moment in the shuttered dark it was all mine. I had become exhilarated but quickly choked with sadness and found that I couldn’t go any further. I have two beautiful children and for forever I’ve wanted to make amends for the un-amendable. This knife is only whetted by becoming a father.

A last look around, in a vain attempt to reignite the happiness, I turn to leave and see something on the counter, amongst the junk mail, I have it with me now. It looks like a list of song titles written in the hand of an old person, all wobbly capitals. “I’m just an old fashioned lady” it says at the top. She would be old by now, the mum, and I have no idea where they’ve all gone.

When my mother died she left a poignant note, scribbled in the same wobbly hand on the back of a birthday card. It reads, Poz, come and get me before the storms, I’ll wait for you.

Doctrine of Alan

“What you doing?” shouts Jane. “Writing a book”, I reply, hunching my shoulders protectively. No time for doing a job, or having an adventure even, when there’s writing to be done. I’m so behind on this project it’s unreal.

It’s convenient for me to forget that no job, no adventure, no adventure, no book - unless it’s a ‘down and out’ adventure, requiring no money, or an adventure in the country of the mind, which is technically free. But I’m not Pirsig, or Peter Hitchens, and I can’t sit down at midnight and write until three, or take a slow boat down the Hudson to organise my thoughts. Anyway, it’s not just the thought it’s the grammar, which takes you this way and that, like the many ways to skin a dead cat.

At least I’m now not so ill. I've had a fever and my chest is creaking like a galleon but the unexpected supply of time robbed from the job and excused from housekeeping provides an opportunity, which I am protecting from all comers. Poz comes in to see what I’m doing and sits on my lap, saying, “I won’t ever leave you daddy.” “Thank you, Poz.” I smile, touch his beautiful face and kiss his forehead. Then his mother calls and he scampers off shouting, "A chocolate biscuit!" Every man has his price it seems and some just aren’t that expensive.

After two or more days entirely in bed, I get bored of just coughing and shaking and start watching some of the stuff I recorded off the TV. The buff, be-hatted presenter of Lost Kingdoms of Africa tours Berber strongholds and tells baffled local historians why they’re important Islamic artefacts. It’s the fact of him telling them that baffles most of all. He also pronounces Islam, Is-lamb, with a very flat English A. If he were to utter the name of the prophet himself it would surely sound like Alan.

It's lost on me and after a short feverish while I come to, daydreaming, in a desert oasis fringed with paused palm trees. There isn’t a cloud in sight and I must have paused it to bathe in the light. I remember this light, my body remembers it; stepping out of a building one evening in Jerez, past a flowering Jasmin; breakfasting on fresh oranges by a pool in Cairo. My dreams fulfil me and I decide to forgo a deeper understanding of the doctrine of Alan and head back to bed.

Head Down, Coming Through

Bumbling, purblind, sleep deprived, wondering how other parents do this, and I’m not even the mum who gets up in the night. But I am the dad, and supposed to be a professional. I can’t answer the phone and ask "what day is it?" but, when it's slow and I'm in the office, I can at least crawl into the back room and pull out the piece of polystyrene packing with the imprint of my skull on it. It’s quiet in there, and warm, with one of the few radiators that works on this floor.

Nothing else gets done but work and chores and playing with my son. I kiss the mum and cuddle the baby and watch for changes in the weather, the meteorological tick tock which means the kids grow up. It happens fearsomely fast because when you’re in it, time becomes elastic. A day can be awfully long and a week incredibly short. What? Saturday again, Abingdon pool, Sunday lunch, back to school? We’re not wishing it away by any means, just peering out from our fur lined nest agog at the things we used to do and the people who are still doing them.

Recently we got lucky, friends babysat for free and we went out to a gig - typically the babysitting doubles the cost of a night like this. We stood in the Rusty Bicycle giggling, like imposters in the process of getting away with it. We'd bought tobacco at the corner shop (neither of us smokes anymore) and promised not to talk about the kids, so we sat in the beer garden in silence, ear-wigging, eyes shining. “I just came in for a lunchtime pint and stayed all day,” said someone happily.

The boys in our little office make me laugh, catching the two of them moaning about not having girlfriends and then moaning about having them. "Girls, tcha!" suddenly they're like new diseases. “She wants a kitten do you think she’s trying to tell me something?” “I have to sleep on the couch whenever her family come to stay. Bloody kids.” My guess is they were formed as adults and broke out of giant seed pods when they were done, like the jokers in Spinal Tap.

For some reason this reminds me of the self-proclaimed grandparents who kept little Poz up on the night flight to Cape Town. On the wine, squawking at each other without lifting their headphones and then glaring at us when it was their time to sleep and he gave up trying. Their wealth of experience was in self-righteousness, could we have but mined that seam and burned it for the fossil fuel it was.