A MAN IN HIS DEFINITIVE MOMENT

A MAN IN HIS DEFINITIVE MOMENT
　
How old is this enormous and towering tree?
How many weary heads have rested here upon this grassy spot in autumns and summers, to look up to these wise wavering branches?
　
I had a certain steady ability about me as a youth.
I’m not sure I can describe it.
I’m not sure I can prove it.
I’m not sure I can put it over to you in such a way that you could relate to it ,either cerebrally or viscerally.
I’m not sure when I gained it or when with hoodwinking gradients it slipped away.
But I’m a telling you there was a certain unique spring in my whole conceptual step just about the time my balls dropped and I was a right rank Herbert!!
　
If you buy me a ruler for Christmas then I can start off with superb and clipped new year resolutions.
I have to say that on that very premise why not get me a compass and a protractor and some irritating coloured felt tipped pens too?
　
Yeah we were the last generation to play ‘Man from uncle’ and ‘The Saint!’ using cap guns and stationary brought back from the general post office.
　
How old is that fair ash though!? Old enough to be your this’ Says the voice of tired Tuesdays and old enough to be your that !‘said some other mediocre week day looking for some form of comic place or identity. And so the keen and eager assembled audience had to accept that the vast tree was as old as it was , not a second older nor an ion closer to peachy cheeked youth!!
　
This week on all the television channels the recession was said to have worsened. Apparently the main reason for this had little to do with economics and was much more linked with the stuff of bad dreams so to speak………………Cricket… and the West Indies did this and that and Pakistan have sold some high flying bowler to the other team whom I know and understand very little about! So these tainted constituents of a semi important tapestry continue to revolve about ones psyche because there is no veritable union to oppose it to be so!
I stood over a large dark round hole in the ground. This was wasteland situated not far from the end of a long and dense wood. I saw myself there looking about me right to the woods and directly ahead of me deep deep down into this vast and peculiar pit. It could have been a dream, it could have been astral projection, it could have been the memory of a forma carnation and it could have been the prophecy of one to come. I did not see outward or perceive in a way with my senses that is the usual way, rather I see myself in the same way I see the woods and the hole. Then, as I look further down into the hole I see layers upon layers of grey upon brown upon black and these are the sinking fathoms of depth and as I do so my senses return to their proper place as the woods vanishes. Then I look up to a tiny circle of light which is the top of the hole which I am now at the bottom of.
　
I loved the smell of paper caps. We used to hit one whole packet with a hammer. The packets were cylindrical, they made a really decent bang. This is not what they were made for. They were made for tet tet tet and not for BANG!! And this was the very beginning of the exploration of the concept of alternative uses.
　
　
　
Magnolia walls and torn aging Bowie posters bringing it back as it was when we first got our grubby mitts on gigantic headphones. Arthur going down the lift every morning and over to the newsagents for half ounce of old Holborn and a copy of the racing times. What a lovely uncle and what a lovely man as handsome as his Maltese D.N.A, he used to love a flutter with Rene backing the outsiders. Here in these stinking towering piles of Ealing and Acton borough council brick, and underneath a skin of growingly alien graffiti is me and my reflective contemplations and here is where it all happened, our growing up that is! Why am I telling ya ? Well its just that these times these places, these events they had something about them I can never quite define, and trying is fun. Some years earlier my Dad carrying me as a toddler had me watch on while he gave a narrative of reverence to the first crude stages of these two towers being built. The foundations were dug and the vast opal stone was being erected. I had a small hand full of large metal imperial money and listened to my Father as he explained what these buildings would be. Then Rene and John left the East Acton prefabs at the end of the late sixties and came here in the early seventies to reside in the sky, looking out from Heathrow to the Post office tower on a clear day. These were the towers of ‘Rebel Rebel’ and ‘Goodbye t Jane’.
　
There was a great deal of trust between me and Alec. We took turns to lock one another in a cupboard under the stairs at his house. Whoever was locked in was completely at the mercy of the other to let him out after. We composed this game whereby the person who did the locking in would lock the door and run out of the house across the road and touch a parked car then return and unlock the door. We both did it numerously and we never failed to unlock that door. That felt like a great friendship.
　
　
When we see what time really is and what before and after really mean then we find ourselves there again looking up at those wavering branches.
　
　
　
TIM SANSOM 3RD MARCH 2009