This is gorjus, Dave. Only bad thing is that it is not a book. You begin a
book, and then with "And I can retrieve too a Saturday . . ." you decide to
fold up your telescope.
Don't be so "cheepstuff"---let us hear it ALL! Seems perfectly lovely and
logical to have a serialised petc novel. Let's open a new "folder"----for
you and others----call it....ummmm.....call it "Wot You LIke". Or call it
"Tuesday Museday" . . . or if any of you remembers the original Sesame
Street: "Let's call it Shirley".
There U R, then.
Joodles
2008/6/30 David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>:
> (A bit early this, but, there y'all are)
>
>
> From My Home Encyclopaedia:
>
>
> I have a vague memory of my father, pot-bellied and seemingly a torso
> with an assumption of legs, but led to bed, assisted by my mother as
> politeness would say, approximately drunk, as a swaying object
> somewhere about the fourth year of my reign.
> In our small flat. Which appeared to possess a hall of sorts, like
> the illusion of perspective, bridging the between of the two bedrooms
> (the smaller, mine; the larger, theirs) and the living-room (ours)
> which was where, in stage terms, the language claimed we acted out our
> lives.
> He does not then seem to appear for years, though for sure he too
> lived with us. He had to do something called work, by day, which was
> distant (sometimes two bus rides away) and alien, as unlike as Welsh,
> and at nights was required by the pub, where George met the Dragon,
> the union, and his mates. Which my mother condemned, for the drink.
> But the plain and ever-present fact of his absence she did not
> protest. Otherwise, he must have inhabited that same mist that covers
> so much of my early (and more recent) memories.
> I think he recurred when I measured eight, as I recall an evening
> before the still-then coal-fire, a glowing snugly winter's evening,
> when my mother urged and urged me to mock his nose (its largeness) his
> tea (its undrinkability) his friends (their smell) his importance (its
> littleness). That fades, and I am sitting on the floor and he is high
> and seated above me but mumbling in a voice he tells me means that he
> was born elsewhere, not, God forbid, here, mumbling all his funny
> (unfunny) stories of his childhood, of crowding with brothers and
> sisters round a pot yum-yumming at the prospect of stewed peel of
> potatoes and apple-rind, of his trousers damp from the wash that
> stank, of horse-shitten cobbled streets, of fresh milk in churns, of
> playing with hot coals in braziers, swinging them faster and faster
> around in an arc from his bare knees to his head and he laughs again,
> his out of place, living in his own world, alone and loveless at the
> hearth at the heart of his family, laugh.
> And I can retrieve too a Saturday and a day-trip on the Midland Red
> through Tewkesbury (where we stopped for toast) and Upton-on-Severn
> (where from the upper-deck I watched how the river looped about the
> houses like a noose about to close) and Evesham, with all its
> close-packed churches, of which I remember nothing.
> And, too, I can re-stock a road by a beach-front at Rhyl (it might
> have been) or Weston or somewhere else to the west and on the coast
> again, walking between and joined to their hands and sensing people,
> adult people, (my parents) for this time at least together, smiling.
> And a restaurant where we ate plaice. Or sole.
> And once seeing him cry, from the numb cold of his bricklaying
> hands, that fed us all, in the bitter world that was his alone and
> winter.
>
>
>
> --
> David Bircumshaw
> Website and A Chide's Alphabet
> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
> The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
> Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
>
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