David Hadley's Blog, page 168

Those Glory Days

It was back in those days when we played those games of naked table tennis deep within the jungles of Walsall, listening to the tribal drums in the heavy dark nights as the strange exotic creatures crept around outside our pagoda.

Those were strange colonial times, there were rumours that the natives were revolting… certainly the ones I’d met were less becoming than one would have – ideally – hoped.

Still, Walsall in those days was a wild frontier town where the men were men and the women… well, shall we just say that a cautious person always played table tennis in the nude just to avoid any surprises, both pleasant and unpleasant, especially in those matches where one’s opponent played without needing a bat.

Soon, though, it became strategically impossible for the old colonial power to keep such a wild and ungovernable place under its jurisdiction. The rebellion broke out and naked table tennis players fled the area in their hundreds all heading for the border, their ping-pong balls bouncing disconsolately down the road as they ran.

It seemed that at last the sun was setting on the last day of the Empire and we will never look upon the like of those days again. Even so, occasionally I get out the old moth-eaten net and check to see if there is still some bounce left in my balls before I strip off, salute the flag and take on all-comers as a way of remembering those glory days.

When the Summer Comes

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When the summer comes; we will be ready. We grow so tired of these cold winters that gnaw at the bones and turn the skin as cold as death. We do not want to spend long dark nights listening to the howling wind as we huddle closer to our stuttering fires.

It will be good to feel the heat of the sun on our naked skin again; to feel warm summer breezes rather than be bitten by the cold sharp winds of winter. Colour will return to these grey lands and there will be sudden rustles in the undergrowth as life comes, grows and spread through this land once again.

Our ancestors came to these cold winter lands a long time ago, times when the world did not seem as cold as it does now.

We should turn away from this place, head back over the southern seas and look for a land that does not pile its winter days up one on top of another for month after month, until no-one can remember the summer, until it seems summer is just a word, a tale told to the children as they huddle and shiver, drawing closer and closer to the fires, hoping for some warmth in their short lives.

One day, yes, we will have to go south and find a land of long summers, even if we have to fight and die to take it, to hold it. Such a life – however short – would be better than these narrow cold lives of endless winters.

The Magician

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I was the magician. For Bess, I could create worlds for her to walk in. I could create lives for her to live. I could create a universe and set it turning around her. I could weave my spells out of nothing and carve shapes out of the empty air and do it all just for her.

We would lie together in that old bed of hers, the lumpy mattress on the old iron frame Bess had cleaned of rust and painted black; with golden highlights on its various knobs and flourishes. The warm summer breezes would blow in from the sea while the afternoons passed outside her window with the distant cries of gulls and the mutterings of holidaymakers passing by below on their way to the beach.

We lay there, her naked body next to mine, as I drew the shape of a new world for her in the empty air above the bed. Then, kissing me and laughing Bess would step out of this world and into the new world I’d created for her.

She would become a princess, a pauper, an adventurer, a thief, a healer or even a magician and I would create the clothes for her and set her down in this new world for her to explore and to win over.

Bess would come back later, many days having passed while I dozed for minutes, to tell me what she had found and who she had met: kings, princes, rogues, killers and thieves, who she had loved, who she had hated who she had bested and who she had killed. She would snuggle back down beside me, saying how no-one there, in that other kingdom, could match up to the life she lived here, in this house on the cliff with me.

One day, though, I made the mistake of making the perfect world for her. Bess stepped off the plane of this world, dressed as a highwaywoman, ready to rob and run wild. That was the last I saw of her, as Bess rode off on the black horse I made for her, and out of my love for her.

I never saw her again.

A Woman and her Canoe

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She, of course, had the canoe ready. ‘There is something so erotic about a woman who has her canoe at the ready’, as Winston Churchill so appositely remarked back in the summer of 1924. Back then, though, it was regarded as somewhat risqué for a woman to be over-familiar with rowboats and to know too much about rowlocks for her station in life, especially if she looked too much like the kind of woman who liked to get an oar in.

The canoe, though, was regarded as eminently suited for the woman of the time, especially as the paddle was deemed to be far les phallic than the rather rude oars. The canoe and paddle also did away with the matter of the rowlocks, without - as in the Victorian era – of having to a gentleman always making certain that his rowlocks were always kept concealed from the ladies whenever he invited them into his boat.

Anyway, that all belongs back in the days of black and white and the strange jerkiness of the silent era, consequently it is of little relevance to the modern age and to the aquatic adventure we were preparing to depart upon.

Still, though, knowledge of history is always useful. This time it did rather adequately – at least I thought so – fill an awkward conversational lull when further up the river she pulled her canoe under a riverside weeping willow tree and lay back on the floor of the canoe, asking me if I could think of anything we could do to pass the time during such a lazy summer afternoon on the river.

Along the River of Days

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The days pass as though they are not quite a dream. They pass like scenes seen on a river bank as time floats slowly down a languid river. The days themselves, like moments seen on the passing river bank, hold themselves out of reach.

We look, but cannot touch. We certainly cannot take the days that pass and shape each one around our lives if we were there living inside them.

We are apart and we cannot touch or change them.

This bed is our boat that floats through these days that pass outside the window. Here, the curtains flicker slowly in the breeze. We know a summer like this will not come again. The world will not wait outside our lives; respectful, keeping its distance, for much longer.

Something, some event, some entangling of time, space and events will come along and sweep us off our boat of freedom; tip us overboard into the river and cause us to swim for the banks where the days wait, ready to pull us onto their shore and back into the world we sailed away from, looking for somewhere else, somewhere of our own.

We know, even as we wrap ourselves around each other once more, that the world is out there, and those passing days will - all too soon – take us back tight into their arms and make us live through their ordinary days once again.

Monday Poem: Shape the Words to Tell

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Shape the Words to Tell

We do not have the mouths to say
to shape the words to tell the stories
of where we have travelled so far
and what has befallen us on these roads.

We do not know how language
can be turned to tell of such horrors
without breaking, without collapsing
into incoherence and so many tears.

We have left the lands of our past
that held us in such tight chains
and stopped us singing our songs.

All our songs about our freedom
were all songs of our mental slavery
and we never opened our eyes

during those silent prayers
to see there was no-one there to listen
no-one there to care, just us
and our desire to remain prisoners.

Where Few Dare Venture

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Of course, you may get one or two of them on your own local High Street, but more often or not they are completely hidden away down a backstreet where few people go, unless they know that such a place exists down there. Even then, few will venture near such places alone, especially at night.

There was a time – inconceivable to civilised people nowadays – when political parties were quite popular. Sometimes people would even confess to being in a political party quite openly and without any of the shame that, these days, attaches to the practice.

Nowadays, though, to even know where your local Conservative, Labour or Liberal club is, is to be regarded with suspicion and - in more genteel places – to risk ostracism. People these days tend to regard the avowedly political as somehow tainted, as infected with some unmentionable disease that could be contagious and so such people are best avoided.

Legend has it that this fear of contagion by politics was the reason for the building of these political-party controlled ‘clubs’ as places – similar in many ways to mental hospitals – here those infected with politics could be kept, isolated and controlled and far away from decent people. These ‘clubs’ were envisioned as places where those infected with the disease of politics could spend their lives without them escaping into wider society and infecting anyone else, or – indeed – doing what those infected with politics usually end up doing – fucking it all up for the rest of us.

The Corridors Between Worlds

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Eager for her breakfast, it wasn’t until Alice looked around, after locking the door to her room, that she realised she wasn’t in the hotel any longer.

She stood, staring around, up and down the corridor, not quite able to believe it.

Admittedly, she had been tired when she checked into the hotel the night before, but she remembered the long straight corridor, almost anonymous, sparsely decorated with the normal bland hotel pictures, fire safety instructions, and the other odds and ends of a typical modern hotel.

This was not that corridor.

For a moment, Alice was not sure, but she remembered that last night, next to her room was a storeroom. She remembered the door propped open as one of the chambermaids filled its shelves with freshly-laundered sheets. The chambermaid had looked up as Alice passed by and exchanged greetings, asking if she needed anything. By then, all she wanted to do was wash, eat a quick meal in the restaurant and then crawl between some of those freshly-laundered sheets and sleep.

Now, here she was in some… suddenly it reminded her of a visit to a stately home from school. One of those school trips that is supposedly educational, but ends up with a herd of wild kids rampaging through the grounds as though being chased by some ravenous pride of predators.

Alice shrugged, thinking that maybe, contrary to what she thought she knew, her room had more than one door that led to more than one corridor and the parts of the hotel she had been in last night from reception to her room to the restaurant and back was part of some modern annexe, and this she was now in was some old ancient part.

She turned to her door, pulling out her key card and found not only was her door locked, it had an old-fashioned lock that needed a key: a big heavy metal key, judging by the size of its keyhole. She looked around over every inch of the doorframe fro top to bottom, but there was no sign of a key card reader, sighing she turned and looked for someone to complain to, but the corridor was empty and the place felt deserted.

Alice shivered, suddenly not wanting to know what lay at the end of the corridor.

Not Ending Well

Well, not only that there was the question of the pineapple… and the look on her face. I have seen that look before… and it did not end well, not for the person who had provoked her wrath, anyway. However, her grim smile of satisfaction as she walked away, wiping her hands, did seem to suggest that she got far more satisfaction than him from the experience.

He looked like he would be waking up from nightmares, screaming, for a long time to come, as well as walking rather gingerly for a while… and remembering – suddenly – not to attempt sitting down.

Still, I suppose it is an effective way to make sure the lesson is learnt… and learnt well.

Rather a waste of a pineapple though, in my opinion.

I am rather fond of pineapples…. Well, I used to be. That is until I’d seen what uses she could put them to.

Could be worse though,… Although, short of an actual visit to a fully-operational medieval torture chamber, I’m not really sure how.

Afterwards, though she was rather pleasant and easy company, so not only did her victim get something out of it, in terms of a lesson well-learnt, she too seemed to find the whole thing rather cathartic.

I suppose I too learnt something, by further increasing my knowledge of the number of things she does get rather too touchy about.

Top Gruyere

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It was only to be expected really, even though she claimed to be an experienced cheese-driver, rallying a Stilton around the country lanes of Gloucestershire is a bit different to taking a Brie out for a drive down your local High Street.

Not only that the speed that some of the high-end Double Gloucester can come off the cheese board from a standing start will do little more than leave a stain on your cracker, especially if you try to take the corner of a water biscuit without changing down your cheese knife.

Of course, some of those continental super-cheeses with their powerful acceleration and speedy assaults on the taste buds may look the part when you seem them spread out on the cheese board, not one of them would be suitable for an English country lane, especially at high speed, and as for using any of them as an off-road cheese, forget it. There you need the traditional English Cheddar, or at least a Red Leicester, unless you want to end upside down in a muddy ditch with butter stains across what is left of your face and a small heap of crumbs where your cheese biscuits used to be.