The bells, the bells…

Like a drunk that stumbles into a shop whilst squaring up to his reflection in the glass doorway, I’ve inadvertently fallen upon my Loveswing blog whilst juggling with wordpress.org, .com, .matrix .cotton, .dotty and just about every conceivable ‘dot’ going just trying to set up multiple users, passwords, Gravatar images, analytics and biogs for our publishing business www.thewritefactor.co.uk… Hold it, is that a large glass of red I see on the horizon?

It feels like a dalliance with a long lost friend as I read back over the Haikus and remember where my mind was (or wasn’t) throughout 2012.  Since that time I’ve moved house, stopped teaching and converted a garage into an office/ studio where we now run our little business and being even nearer to the sea, I step out onto the cliffs every morning, with my ‘border terrorist’ Jack and lose myself for an hour before work.

Funnily enough, I wrote a Haiku yesterday, the first since those times. I had decided to go bell ringing…well, why not? I turned 50 this year, (I feel it’s a graceful move into eccentricity) and I only have to stumble across the road as we live, literally, below the tower.

In fact i wrote three:

watching the tower
peeping through summer sea fret
will it welcome me?

Reverberation
centuries old – wait… a caw!
tinnitus raven

Let the bells ring out!
spring, summer, autumn, splinter
oops – dropped a clanger

As before, not much thought and I know, a couple of bent rules!

Well, it’s been nice popping by – like that stumbling drunk, I shall gather up my wares and leave as quietly as possible…mumbling and cursing about the weather…and politics…and…

Is there anybody out there?

1980 – Fifteen years old, desperate to get back to London as my parents had moved to Devon ‘by mistake’
Twelve of us hired a minibus, on route to London stopped at a pub near Bristol where all but the driver entered into a ‘booze-athon’
Back on the M4 – stopped by the police for throwing something out of the window – a very pissed Bob Given’s (RIP) lunch, basically.
Whilst being ‘pressed’ by the police, under an air of patchouli, denim and hair, a passing lorry causes our side window to vibrate and fall out.
On arriving in London, my cousin and I slip off to Leicester square and Soho to generally play havoc when eventually, heading to Earls Court, we are stopped and searched by the police. We have nothing apart from 10 No 6, a red bus rover ticket and a squashed Bazooka Joe.
The gig was incredible. The sheer size of the arena as well as the stage show was something I’d never experienced. Floyd were notoriously boring live so the concept of The Wall being built by roadies whilst the band played in front, behind and on top off, was mesmerising. Whilst the band stood stock still, no doubt avoiding eye contact with each other, the theatrics stole the show.
What happened after the gig is a bit of a blur – all I can remember is waking up under a flatbed lorry in Vauxhall bridge car park nursing a mammoth hangover and a slight recollection of stepping onstage with a drag act and doing lots of ‘Bassey hands’
After gathering the clan we set off for home and promptly break down on the M4 outside Bristol. We call the hire van company and they send out a speed freak who tows us into Bristol at breakneck speed on a piece of rope that is approximately 4 foot long so we can’t see the road ahead. It’s feels like a video game.
Arriving in one piece, we exchange the van and head West.
On entering the M5 slipway, we crash into a mini.
The police arrive and they notify us that we have no tax disc. After a long and drawn out discussion we are off again.
Dropping the van off in Exeter, we have a heated discussion with the hire company about the tax disc and dodgy window situation, which nearly comes to blows as we flee the scene holding back payment.
Lying in bed that night, I think of Roger Water’s concept of alienation, love, death, sex, ego, glamour, fascism..whatever The Wall meant to the listener…I’d just been through it in 24 hours!