Mood Music

One of those days.  The mood dropping like a stone over a cliff.  I needed to get out.

I couldn't believe how balmy it was.  I hadn't gotten to the end of the road before having to stop and remove jacket and jumper and stuff them in my rucksack.  Who'd have thought it - walking to the seafront in a t-shirt in March?

I bought a beer and sat on the end of the stub of the pier to drink it.  I should explain.  Most of the pier was destroyed in the storms of 1978, the year I moved here.  All that remains are this first bit - about the size of a football pitch - and the end of it, two-thirds of a mile out across the mud-coloured sea.  Isolated it is out there, like a ruined celestial city in the afternoon haze.  A part - but apart.  Just as it appears on the cover of my novel.

I sat for a while and looked at it, feeling the beer-rush in my head, feeling the mood lift at last.  Such a perfect day.  Not even a breeze to ruffle the incoming tide.  Down there, a seagull sits on a buoy (8 knots) - watching me watching him.  He jumps down at last and settles on the water, sending gentle ripples over towards me.  The horizon is just visible - a smudge of colour between sea and sky.  I move my head through 180 degrees and never take my eyes off the sea once.  The turbines are out there - white-fingered skeletal windmills - static in the heat-mist.

I think about a day, 16 years ago, when I stood in the same spot, looking at the same things.  I felt inspired, then, to write a poem.  So I did...

 

Life was made for such days.

Sun enough to soften the grass.

A breeze so light it brushes

like a kiss from someone

barely known, though

coming familiar - brushes

 

like the wing-tips

of the gulls, skimming the

skin of water, raising no

ripple in their wake. 

 

Ships pass at a blue distance.

The sound only of dogs -

heard as at night, across

valleys, in old dreams.

 

I take the steps to the

sea wall, kicking pebbles

off the edge as I head along,

thinking of little except

a line of verse, the sense of

worth intrinsic in this, the

comfort of familiar things.

 

I glimpse her in passing -

a moment in the shine of an eye,

a flick of hair, a thing not said.

I look back.

 

There are possibilities.

Always, there are possibilities.

 

            I felt so positive then.  It was the beginning of a new phase in my life. 

            And I did glimpse someone in passing.  Things happened.  Possibilities opened up.  I met a special person.  My soul mate.  The woman I'd always dreamed about, but never expected to find.  And within a year, we were married.

            And then came the rest of life, with the destruction and grief it so often brings.

            Today, I look at that view, and what do I feel?  Hope?  No.  Possibilities?  No.  I feel melancholy.  A sense of being 16 years older.  I feel that certain opportunities - that once seemed to arise by the day - are now gone forever.  I feel loss. 

            I finish my beer and walk back towards home. 

            On the seafront, two young women come up to me, smiling.  Suddenly, I'm alert again.

            'Excuse me,' one of them asks.  'Can you tell us where's the best place to go for some fish and chips?'

            I direct them to a place up by the clocktower.

            'Perfect,' she says - all teeth and sparkling eyes, and they turn away.

            Something occurs to me.  I don't want the conversation to end just yet.

            'No, wait....'  I say.  'There's a better place, in the High Street.  Their whitebait is succulent.  I'm going that way.  I can show you.'

            I walk them up the short hill and point.

            'Perfect,' they say, together.  'Thank you.'

            I watch them go, hand in hand.

           Then I turn for home. 

           I switch on the computer.  I write this.

           I feel, perhaps, a little better.

           Perhaps.

 

           I listen to this, which was played at my wedding.  Our wedding.

          A long time since.  A long time...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2-fl1bvhwo

         And finally, I cry.

         It's what was needed all along.