A fairly pointless ramble

I’m sitting here trying to play this goddam banjo and just wondering if any of this is real at all.  Acquaintances that come and go like the characters that inhabit the dreams of my sleeping nights.  The people who tonight will be absorbed by the television in the corner of the room (the one in the corner of this room is dark and lifeless as a derelict theatre).  Yet we plough on as all before and, doubtless, those to follow into what?  What great human necessity drives us?

What, really, is the point?  We are milling around an endless postmodern soiree buttonholing here and passing pleasantries there.  And the whole thing boils down to the square root of fuck-all.  We are in danger of being overwhelmed by a universe of trivial crap.  Maybe the Somme isn’t to all tastes, Kursk frazzled a youth or two, but at least there was something at stake. 

I sense we are inventing causes.  Newspapers fill their column inches with the apocalyptic pronouncements of one “Expert” after another and it all amounts to nothing.  The only things we are likely to die of are boredom and diabetes. 

(On the other hand, beware of people pedaling Utopia - be suspicious of simple answers to complex problems.)

How did I become so detached?  I could be in there with everyone else, nibbling at canapés, sipping pinot grigio and discussing Britain’s Got Talent. 

Ruminants!  Poor bovine followers! The talent is all over in the opposite direction.  Light years from the formulaic garbage that you have become conditioned to absorb in the hope that you will sign up for a car, buy a cyclone-concept vacuum cleaner or sail off on an overcrowded cruise to must-see coastal gems.  Aaaaargh!  For fuck’s sake cruise them off the Somali coast for some excitement in their fading lives. 

Where did reality go?  Was it an accident or a carefully planned walk into the wilderness by the minds that brought you the consumer economy.  The ones that decided manufacturing was passé and that a nation that imports everything it needs can actually survive handbags at dawn with a real tooled-up and committed foe.  Time will tell on that one.  We only just survived the last scuffle.

But I have Rioja, a banjo and work to do.  Why should I be wasting my time worrying about this shit, never mind writing about it?  Fifty-two in a couple of weeks and soon I’ll be gone.  Like my old General Studies lecturer and drinking mate Stewart.

I last saw him in the back room of the Brown Cow in York – a Timothy Taylor’s pub in those days, in the heart of where my Irish ancestors drank and brawled.  He regaled me with his cycling exploits – riding to London, then over to France to take part in the gruelling Paris-Brest-Paris cycle race.  All this was spoken through a haze of cigarette smoke, while burping Taylor’s Landlord gas at each other. 

We first met when he attempted to teach a bunch of ignoramus apprentices at the local Technical College in 1978.  After a chance meeting in the Brown Cow nine years later, we met regularly for a while and I almost bought a hand-build touring bicycle from him.  We rode around the villages to the east of York, towards the Wolds, for me to try it.  Past beautiful verges of daffodils near Buttercrambe.  In the end, I couldn’t justify the couple of hundred quid while raising a young family on a single wage but, hey, it was a good ride.

So the other night I thought I’d look him up, more than twenty-five years on.  All I found in hours of nocturnal surfing was a mention, by a musician, of a late friend in whose memory a gig was to be played.  Many Google search permutations on, I suddenly saw his name among the 1987 Paris-Brest-Paris finishers.  A listing of thousands, like the Glorious Dead: “83H47, 4122, HAMBLIN, Stewart, GB, M, VE, A.U.K. NORTHEAST”. 

Eighty-three hours and forty-seven minutes.  The weather, apparently, had been poor. 

There are not that many inspirational people in my life, but he was one for sure.  He cycled all the way back to London after the race, his legs giving up at Kings Cross.  I remember the tale so well. 

Stewart, if all the evidence leads to the inevitable, rest in peace my friend.