a long strange trip indeed

You're sick of hanging around and you'd like to travel
Tired of travel, you want to settle down
I guess they can't revoke your soul for trying
Get out of the door - light out and look all around

Sometimes the light's all shining on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it's been

It's been three months since I last blogged which is the longest break I've taken since I started way back in 2010. I hadn't got bored with it or anything like that, I've just been very busy and the break became rather extended.

My last post mentioned the fact that I was about to retire - we were about to retire! Both Mrs Dave and I packed our trunks and said goodbye to the circus at the end of July. There were fond farewells and all that and then we had a major wedding to attend. Our middle daughter got married at the start of what we still thought of as the Summer holiday. As we were still paid until the end of August, we didn't consider ourselves retired until the first day back for everyone else!

During the Summer break we went away around East Anglia a few times with friends, enjoyed our eldest daughter's brief return from Mexico and my friend John and I also took ourselves off on a Rock'n'Roll tour of London. There will be more on that in a future blog - I also feel the need to mention the similar tour from last year in New York.

Obviously there has been far more than those few things going on. Most of May and June were taken up with exam marking and there was rather a lot of finishing off and packing up from our place of work. More recently there had been two more weddings to attend. We've had dealings with various agencies to sort out our pensions. Mine is incredibly modest but I felt it time to stop working in an environment that was becoming increasingly more bogged down in a mire of trying to outguess and impress Ofsted than actually concentrate on just educating kids. There has also had to be a gradual coming to terms with the fact that we would not be rushing off to work any more. No more pointless meetings, unnecessary admin tasks or lessons to prepare. No more lesson observations and constant criticism.  However, Mrs Dave has been very busy (indeed, still is) remarking Psychology A level exam papers. So all in all, the laptop has been pretty well taken up recently. It has been so busy lately that I've taken the step of using our older laptop which chugs along slowly but gets there in the end (usually).

So, sitting here tapping away at a laptop that occasionally misses letters and whole phrases out, I have returned and hopefully will be corresponding with anyone out there still listening.

Whilst it has indeed been a long strange trip, here's to many more adventures to come.

keep the home fires burning

chop me some broken wood
we'll start a fire
white warm light the dawn
and help me see
old satan's tree

The sun sets quite late at this time of year, of course. As Mrs Dave and I sat in the garden watching the family of swifts screech overhead enjoying the plethora of flying insects that none of us can name, feeling the last vestiges of heat from the sun and our tiny chiminea and supping the last of the wine, we pondered something that even Mrs Dave accepted as "a good question". More of that later.

The day started well with the sun suggesting that it might bother to poke its head out from under its coverings and offer us more than a glimpse of what could be. I wandered about - not too difficult as our garden is so small an Action Man couldn't get lost in it. We've never had any luck growing strawberries but this year Mrs Dave decided that actually, although she said we wouldn't, we would anyway. And they've managed to produce something. A small bowl like this won't (most likely) excite many but this is a first for us! With a couple more added ten minutes later - we have a small

crop of strawberries. Despite not having any need to buy salad for nearly three weeks, we have mostly managed to grow Nasturtiums. It's a good thing they're edible. We've lived in this house for something like a quarter of a Century. We're used to the vagaries of this tiny town house garden and the salt from living two hundred yards from the sea. It's just great that stuff grows. This year we've also managed to keep all sorts of things growing. Although it's like a bonsai approach, I'm getting a lot of pleasure out of the little daily pleasures afforded to us: strawberries, nasturtiums, mint, salad and small peppers.

First born needed to be taken to Colchester train station to start her holiday properly. By that I mean she needed to leave the family home and start catching planes and visiting European cities. So, after four days home, it was time to get off on the real trip. Off to Hyde Park, then. Mrs D.suggested that she could make her some sandwiches. I was immediately put in mind of my first Hyde Park gig. 1970, I believe. She's off to see the Stones but I went to see Pink Floyd. She will see them as they wind down their operation, I went to see the Floyd as their star started to rise. I must have been all of 14 years old. I still can't believe that my mother thought it was okay to let me go. A packet of cheese (possibly jam) sandwiches - which was probably all we could afford as she had to provide my train fare too - in my pocket and off I went. This is where the kindness of strangers comes into play. There were some older lads from my school - I was a very lowly third year (Y9 in new money) - and at least one of them took pity on me. After the incredulous reaction that, yes, my mum HAD let me go - look, she's made me some jam sandwiches for Christ's sake -  they looked after me for the day.  Which is pretty good, really, because a 14 year old kid in 1970 was a much different beast to a 14 year old kid in 2013. But, for now, we'll let that go.

Where were we? Oh yeah, after sitting taking in the last few days, we relaxed and thought of how we've just got a week (and two days) left until we finally get to relax for a few weeks. And then it all starts up again. . . but whilst we chatted idly, a point of order reared its (not ugly) head. Having sat and enjoyed the barbecued food I wondered  when we, in England, first started to eat barbecued food. I can't remember my parents EVER having a barbecue. I do remember that at the start of the 1980s many of us were having them. Who introduced them and when was YOUR first barbie? I seem to think that the Galloping Gourmet may have been our earliest introduction but that could be so wrong . . .

Answers please . . .

Still, we sat by the chiminea until Mrs Dave needed to go and read a book for her Reading Group (ironically enough The Slap which starts at a barbecue) and I thought I should go and write this and then watch A Field in England.

All in all, then, another quiet night in England. I may wander out and sit quietly in the garden drinking the Mescal First Born brought as a present from Mexico and listen to some mellow music. So, we have two projects here: your first barbie and what music would be a good soundtrack for a quiet late night chilling out on a lovely summer evening?

summer is in

summer is in
everyone sing
aah! let us begin . . .*

It seems that for a day or two we are able to enjoy some warm seasonal weather down here on the east coast.  It's about time.  The weather has been awful. During half term week I was marking - the annual festival of AS Film Studies exam marking that takes up several weeks of my time.  As the weather was so bad this year I just got on with it and didn't feel that I should be out and about in it.  Or worse still, off on holiday somewhere.  It has been ridiculously cold so far in this neck of the woods.  The poppies pictured are in a field on the road that became infamous a few years ago where several prostitutes were found murdered by the "Suffolk Ripper" or whatever naff name they gave him.  Beauty and calm have returned to a lovely stretch of countryside by the A14.

Still, back to the matter at hand, I did manage to visit friends in my old home town.  We walked in what is now called "Forster Country".  Forster wrote Howards End about a house that is nearby to my old parish church, St Nicholas in Stevenage. The house is actually called Rooks Nest and a friend of mine from schooldays used to be the gardener there. He's a taxi driver now.

We walked up through the churchyard where many of us have seen ghosts - for another time perhaps.  It's quite overgrown in places.  An area of importance for some rare species of plant my friend informed me. The solitude of church graveyards is a wonderful thing in daylight.  The amount of wildlife that lives in them is phenomenal - I hoped to see a jay as there are so many oak trees there. No jays, but we stumbled onto this small mark of Forster's importance to the area.  As you walk past this into the field behind I had a rush of what? Nostalgia? No, but a memory of those long cross country runs we had to undertake from school.  Our school was just down the avenue from the church.

In those days we had to do a real cross country run.  In these days of risk assessments and a paedophile in every hedgerow (nature deficit disorder!!) kids just have to run around the school field a few times.  That's in those schools that haven't sold off their school fields.  Still, hardly a "cross country" run, is it? Running around the school field was a punishment that the science teacher used to excel in when I were a lad. In those days come rain, mud, snow, hail, whatever - rarely sunshine, though - we had to run through the avenue, churchyard, fields. Sunshine was only for those long hot summers we had in those days. After the run, covered in caked mud and feet clogged with chalk, we were forced to go into the communal shower. It was always a bit disconcerting that the P.E. teacher was in there with you, but hey! it was a boy's school.:
"Pass the soap, lad."
"Yes sir." Thing is, he never went on the run with us.

With several skylarks twittering away high over the fields and my friend's dog startling the partridges, it was a great feeling to walk through the years and dredge up some memories.  On the way home a jay flew out of a tree and plonked itself onto the side of the A14.  I knew I was going to see one that day.

Thinking back to the walk through the churchyard and how it is becoming as immaculately unkempt as Francis Rossi's hairdo, there seems to be a synchronicity at large here.  I have become fascinated by the way the the real world - that's nature you know, weeds and foxes and stuff - has begun to encroach into our world more and more.  The urban world if left alone will always be colonised: weeds, after all, were the first things to grow on the bombsites after WW2. So, "only connect" indeed. I get interested in this stuff just as the BBC decides to show a programme about the unnatural wildlife of London. I missed it, of course, but thanks to iPlayer I can sit and watch it in bed with a cup of tea later tonight.  I missed it because I went to see Prometheus last night: a film that concerns itself very much about the nature of life itself. I'll leave it to others to judge its shortcomings but it's an interesting film.  Eric Von Daniken where are you now?

So reading about small wildernesses and the way the natural world finds a way of constantly surviving seems to be cropping up (no pun intended) all over the place.  Here we have a little jungle - a whole ecosystem - sitting happily outside a house with a usually immaculate garden at the end of my road. I find this sort of patch far more interesting - actually, far more beautiful - than an unnatural garden.  I like the poppies and nettles colonising anywhere and everywhere. More on this another time.

When the sun comes out and we start to feel a bit better about ourselves, I enjoy cooking more and more.  Winter's fine with its stews and heavy meals but the summer starts me thinking about more interesting things to do.  Last Sunday I smoked some mackerel. I had hell of a job getting the Rizlas around it but to be absolutely honest, I am very impressed with the results.  We ate it last night and there were no side effects, just the genuine taste of lightly smoked mackerel.  Mind you, the house stinks but what the hey? Next time I'm going up to the local fishmongers and get some really fresh fish off the boat, maybe some prawns too. Home smoked fish, eh? Whatever next?

* Summer Is In by Anne Briggs - recorded in the early 1970s just down the road from here in Little Bealings with Steve Ashley and his short-lived band Ragged Robin.