Time in a Bottle

The photograph shows the door of the front bedroom in our house, where we have lived since summer 1996, when the kids, Bill and Tom, were aged six months and two and a half years. Up to around our older son Bill’s tenth year, the boys shared this bedroom. I know that everything has to change, that time goes on and for the most part we should embrace the change, but there are moments… A couple of years ago, I passed a bicycle with one of those trailers for little kids to sit in behind it. In Cambridge, a cycling town, these vehicles are very common. It was parked outside a front door, and while the mother unlocked the door and secured the bicycle to the adjacent railings, the little three-year-old boy sat in the trailer singing a song to beguile the time. Our boys are aged 28 and 30. I wanted to burst into tears.

As you can see, although neither of the boys lives with us any more, we have never taken their names off the door. Since 2000, I have had mobile phone after mobile phone, supplied by my work, so that they can bug me at any time of the day or night. Each time I have got a new one, I have transferred the contact details from the old one. The list still contains the former phone number of my mum, who died more than twenty years ago. I have never had the heart to remove it.

Time in a Bottle is a song by the American singer-songwriter Jim Croce, who tragically died at the age of 30 in a plane crash. As I understand it, it is a love song to his wife Ingrid and to the child she was carrying at the time. It expresses very eloquently the longing to keep things as they are and the impossibility of doing so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h1davKgBYM

I think for most of us, we think of our lives in discrete phases. Before I went to school. When I was at school. When I was a university student. As a young fellow, thinking myself Jack the Lad. Before Hurricane Linda. After Hurricane Linda. Before we had kids. When the kids were pre-school. When the kids were at school. And so the long day wears on.

I vaguely remember a play on the telly when I was a kid. At one point in this black and white story, a rich and rather lonely man reminisced about his wild and exciting youth to his personal manservant (remember this was on the box a long time ago), and said, ‘Where have those days gone, Jevons?’ or whatever the servant’s name was. The servant replied, ‘They haven’t gone anywhere, sir. We have.’

I love being retired. I don’t want to go back to work. I don’t particularly want any of the old days back, although from the above you can see that there is the occasional hankering- for example, I did love it when the kids were pre-school. But if there is any moral at all to the sentimentalising above, it is that you can actually get some of the past back, in a sense. Now that we have an empty nest, Linda and I have picked up some of the foreign travel that we did a lot of before we had kids. We recently returned from the USA, where Linda had just had a two-month sabbatical at Ann Arbor, Michigan, and afterwards we had two weeks enjoying the most kind and lavish hospitality of our dear friends Bob Smith and Irina Supruniuk, in Atlanta.

                                                Cheshire Cat in the Botanic Gardens, Atlanta GA

And on the occasions that the boys can join us on the foreign trips, it is a lovely bonus.

From 2000 to around 2018, I and my old pal Kevin from school worked within a mile or so of each other in East Central London. We would meet for lunch in the pub once or twice a month. There were times when we parted to return to our respective occupations when there was a strong temptation to simply stay all afternoon and get roaring drunk. We would actually plan and carry out this operation twice a year, once in summer and once just before Christmas. Well, we can still do it. We don’t have to be at work to meet up for a well-lubricated lunch. We did so on Wednesday and had a great time.

I think it was in 2008 that Frank, another old pal from schooldays, restored contact. I’m sure I have said in a previous blog how highly I value the fact that the three of us, who first met aged 12 as new guys at St Andrew’s School, Kirkcaldy, in 1968, still see each other regularly.

I now also regularly meet up with another old pal from university days, Dave Walker, who is something of my senior in creative writing. Dave retired a little earlier than I did and has written and published several thrillers since then. I am hoping to follow in his footsteps, and the periodical lunchtime meetings are where I try to learn the tricks of trade by a process of beer and curry osmosis.

I recently finished writing my first thriller, set in Durham and London in the 1980’s. I am touting it round agents, with no success so far. Here is the proposed acknowledgement page.

It is difficult to acknowledge the multitude of people who have helped this along, but I should definitely mention a few. I owe a lot to Harlan Coben’s BBC Maestro course in thriller writing. As well as teaching me some important principles, Mr Coben’s course gave me a lot of confidence. I am also deeply indebted to friends and family who encouraged, edited and criticised my writing over the years. These include, in no particular order: Kevin Connelly, a talented poet and playwright; David Walker, who has already published a couple of thrillers, and who manfully struggled through the first draft of this, spotting numerous issues and making many helpful suggestions; David Bleiman, an accomplished poet who writes in a mixture of Yiddish and Lowland Scots; Dr Kevin Hillman of Leg Iron Books, who has published some of my short fiction and given me much encouragement; and my brother John, who has himself published some short stories and who for more than six decades has been an indispensable mentor in both my day job and my spare time writing. I owe so much more to my wife Linda and my sons Bill and Tom, who over the years have put up with me noodling about on the computer when I should have been paying attention to them.

The characters may live in the same places as real people, but they are all imaginary. Winthrop College Durham doesn’t exist- I mixed up a number of Durham and Cambridge colleges in a bowl. The pubs the Shakespeare and the Dun Cow in Durham definitely do exist. The Harrow Tavern on Dead Man’s Hill in Wembley did exist in the 1980’s, as did its sub-department, Animal Corner, but both are now long gone. Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Incidentally, the Irish humorist Flann O’Brien, in his Irish Times column, once proposed a machine to put in the back garden to catch and freeze snow. Then when some pretentious pillock asked, ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ you could drag him out the back, point to the machine and say, ‘They’re in there, you fool!’