It was the last pre-Murdoch summer, just before the consensus began to crumble, just before the new aggressive individualism began to emerge from both left and right. And for one summer one boy in an England that probably never really existed - but the best time in your life to dream is before you know the deeper truths, and I'm glad I had the chance - had the time of his life, the most evanescent and thus most piquant of universes made possible by a visitor from nine centuries before, the sort of life that was, by obvious definition, never truly possible, but if you can never believe that it is at some early point in your life you never really live.
And at the summer's end, just as the longest - and nearest to home - engagement in the history of the British Army set in, he walked down to the lake and stood, silent, as his muse disappeared, unconsciously sensing his own childlike faith in childhood's end. The following spring, concurrent with "I Want You Back" and what, for most of us today, is the beginning of time, we saw it all happen, and it has never left us, even as it has come to seem as unfamiliar, as far beyond the modern rules and assumptions, as the England of the 11th Century must have seemed to Butskellite children.
We're out on our own now, more than ever.
You say your 29 so I dont know you did it, but you nailed it completly .The last line jars like an exposed tooth nerve.
ReplyDeleteYes, I am 29 (he blushed). But I think I have an instinctive feeling for things beyond my personal experience ... quite a few people have speculated, only half-jokingly, that I had some kind of time machine within me. That mental ability to travel and sense what had been before ... it's a rare gift. It must not take me over, because there is much that has to be dealt with *now*, but you can only really understand the present once you understand the forces that created it.
ReplyDeleteNext time I watch an episode from that first series it will all seem *much* further away, I know that.
Dear Robin,
ReplyDeleteBeautiful, absolutely beautiful. "Will you come back one day?" was the first thing that came into my head when I heard that our "brother in magic" had left us. At some point, not now, but at some point, I will travel over to Boldermere Lake and ask that question again. I dare say there are many of us who need to do that. Sadly, at least in this life, it will just throw back more questions than answers. Until then, I fear we have lost yet another bridge with our youth and the time of innocence.
Modern life is indeed rubbish, but Catweazle offered a glimpse of what it could be like if we could only imagine. Robin/Carrot was key to a lot of this, and I now just feel completely excised from one of the few times when it all made some sort of sense.
Love,
Simon Wells
Just finished 'Abbey Road' and I could *see* Carrot as the final notes faded into oblivion and future that never came ...
ReplyDeleteGiggs and Ghetts, though.