Fells

Mum and Dad went to Calverdale with Rob and Carol yesterday and today they’ll be striding the fells. I might go home next weekend as they’re off to Scotland, so I can get my extended essay started.

A dewdrop, a bubble, a dream

Robert strikes me as being consistently sad and down at heart. Maybe this melancholic streak (which he’s inherited from Dad) accords with Buddhism’s acknowledgement of mortality and destiny in death. I have it too but it’s often overridden by the everyday joys of youth. It’ll emerge in time I suppose, abiding and permanent.

I’m scared of getting old. My life now is full of zap (no matter be it bad zap, still zap all the same) and I don’t want to lose the great sweeping tides of feeling and end up middle-aged in mind and outlook. As Carol and I listened to Roxy Music’s first album today, she told me that inside she feels just the same as she did in 1972 when she was 18. Dad too has often said that inside he feels just like he did when he was my age. I can’t believe I’m almost nineteen. It doesn’t seem so long ago since I was the kid who regarded nineteen-year olds as adults.

Now I'm part of that world too.

I planned on going back to Egley, but just as I was shoveling down  food so I could catch the last bus, Mum and Dad showed up, fresh from Badon. They had a good time and visited Avebury, Silbury Hill, Castle Coombe etc. Andrew got a 2.1 degree, much higher than the 3 he’d expected.

It was a fine evening, so Mum, Dad and I walked down through Saxton village. The sky was clear, the green peaceful tree-topped hills were bathed in warm light, a scene marred only by the raw scars that mark the new bypass that has cut straight across the little path that used to lead up past the farm and into the grass and woodland beyond. We paused at the pub for a pint, overshadowed by cool green trees, before continuing on past the village and out along the road towards the roundabout.

Mum picked wild daisies and I ribbed her by telling her that she was committing a crime. This semi-jocular banter continued all evening.

Really here in name only

A thoroughly lazy day. I spent it either listening to records, watching television, or looking at books. McEnroe pasted Lewis 6-2, 6-2, 6-2 in the Wimbledon final and then I saw John Lloyd become the first Brit since 1936 to win a Wimbledon title when he won in the mixed doubles.

Rob played a few of his hundred of records, most of which date from the early- to mid-‘70s, and he waxed nostalgic about the era he was my age (1973). A new brand of cynicism is abroad now and those laid-back easy days seem to have gone forever, but still live on in Rob’s records, on songs that sound woefully out of sync with the mood at large, especially among young people.

Some of his records make me nostalgic, and remind me of his student days at Valley Shore College and my visits there. One image in particular imprints itself on my memory: a figure sitting at a desk in a room that Rob wanted to show me because he said it was haunted; as we opened the door the light streamed in white and dazzling behind the person at the desk. I also remember sitting in the audience at a play or something, and in the seats in front of me was a man with a huge ugly football-like growth on the back of his neck, which showed through the strands of white hair draped over his collar.

In the afternoon Carol, having politely ignored the issue since I arrived, couldn’t help jeering at my accent, which is tinged now with a southern twang. “You sound very middle-class and well-cultured,” she said. Me!? Cultured and middle-class!? That’s horrible!

Just as my northern tones used to reveal themselves on the vowel sound ‘o,’ now these self-same vowel sounds betray a traitorous tongue.

I went to bed early after watching a TV play, Rhino, about a 14 year-old black truant called Angie. The portrayal of the apathy of the school staff and the pointless insistence on doing things which teach fuck-all of practical use in the world at large was all-too accurate and got us fired up and angry. The whole education system is rotten to the core.

Of course it takes a TV programme to spur me into indignation. I wish I could maintain this sense of urgency and anger all the time!