Michael

Michael takes small steady steps, there’s no bobbing, so when he crosses the long grass he has the appearance of travelling on wheels.

He glides up next to me, his fat farty Labrador sniffing along behind him.
Michael is a self-styled shaman: he doesn’t drink, or smoke, but every now and then, when the mood takes him and the season is upon us, he takes himself off to the Welsh mountains, builds a fire, and gorges himself on mushrooms.
Magic ones.

He’s got to be sixty if he’s a day; he’s been around, came over here from Malta in ‘63.

Nowadays, he has a thick wiry beard, black and white hairs like paintbrush bristles, and he wears very thick glasses.
I’ve never seen him without his woolly hat either. He may be bald.
The top of his hat comes up to my nose.

Whenever he regales me with tales of the old Maltese clip joints in the old sixties Soho, and his escapades from when he first rolled into London, I always picture this little bearded man, with his bobble hat and smelly dog, wandering through these dens of promised iniquity, arguing with the prostitutes and fighting with the mugged-off punters.

It was the same when I was a lad; I never imagined old people had ever been anything else.
Of course, I heard their stories, but they were not like me.
They had never been young like me.

Now I’m older, I’ve seen their photos.

And I’m in my forties myself, so I’m getting a taste for how it feels to be looked upon as nothing but an “older” man .
Now I can look on the older men, and envisage their youth.
We were, and are all the same.

But for some reason a Michael with thick glasses and paintbrush whiskers will always be wheely-gliding through all the stories of his life that he tells me when we meet on the Common of a morning or afternoon.

Of course, up in the mountains, when he’s attempting to merge with the universe via the use of some freshly picked fungi, that is the right and fitting image.