In My Mind

Remember the song 'In my mind I'm going to Carolina...'  Well I've been some places in my life and over the years they seem to have stuck with me.  I can't remember what I said to people yesterday, but forty, fifty years ago...that's a different story.

I have literally been on a journey around the country.  My time on British Rail spanned twenty three years and took me all over the UK.  Fortunately I have that kind of memory that can recall images to go along with the words, so to speak.  It's most likely I have some sort of Dyslexia (for like many other conditions, it has many forms) and it is most certainly not a curse.  No, far from it.  My audio-visual memory has enabled me to write about stuff as if it were still happening.  Even better if it involves kinesthetics. If someone is talking to me, my mind is taking a recording of the sights and sounds that accompany that moment and I am able to 'put a label' on it and recall it when I choose.

So as I sit here in the peace and calm of another beautiful Autumn day, with the cows in the field opposite chewing thoughfully.  I can go anywhere at any time of my life and live the moment again.  Although it is the random images I find the most fun.  I can be staring out of the window across the fields and suddenly I am on a Tube Train in London and running into Moorgate Station, heading for Liverpool Street.  The year is 1974 and it is late evening.  I cast my mind's eye across to what was then a BR bay platform.  In that platform is a Type 31 Brush Locomotive on a train it has just brought in. Sat in the cab, feet up on the desk is one of the first black train drivers to make that grade.  We had one at Stratford in the very early seventies.  I supposed I noticed him for that reason, but like many, he looked bored as he waited for the moment he would move into action again.

He's still there in my mind.  Almost like a ship in a bottle frozen in time.  I still visit London on the odd occasion and when I go through Moorgate Station, I see him still there reading his paper.  This is what I love about my mind.  I can travel and it doesn't cost me a penny and when I have had enough,  I return instantly to my couch and once again I'm writing at my laptop.  I don't mind my twighlight years.  They are a time for me to reflect.  I was once told by a fourteen year old I was teaching to 'Get a life Sir!'  He had gone no further than the town centre from the estate on which he lived. Done no more than hang around on a street corner with his mates.  No, I'm not judging him, but I did get a life and it is that life I have now begun to recall.  There is a lot to go through and like going through a box of old photographs, the room rings with "Wow! I'd forgotten about..." 

To the power of the mind.  Long may it keep churning out my yesterdays.