2nd July – I want to shout, but I can hardly speak.

–I always assume that we are of the same cohort. Apologies if our grooves don’t run in parallel. There is much to catch up on. I owe you an explanation, I know, but not yet. Nearly. I need first to tell you about my coming out party–

I’d forgotten this. Being in an altered state. Sure, there’s all the laughing, and weird sensations, and the dawning clarity about mundane aspects of life. You want to share it all with your fellow-party goers, then you tune in to the fact that they’re with you, and seeing the same things. And, Neil always said this, everybody forgets about the euphoria that comes with it all. He’s right, it’s the best bit, that all-consuming joy and sense of wellbeing, but there is an aspect about being under that nobody ever mentions in their recollections – and it’s this: for a while you get to reconnect with the courageous little thing that you used to be.

Hasn’t someone prescribed mushrooms to cure a decimated self-esteem? If they haven’t yet, they ought to. The scientists. The people who would have the lowly status of office workers were it not that they wear white overalls, and do their work standing up. Those fuckers. They need to get a shift on. I digress. Some naughty urban guerilla spiked the punch last Saturday, and I spent what could have been a demanding afternoon in a swoon of self-tolerance for a while.

The party organiser did a smart thing, and imposed a playlist, which she let rip from an inaccessible speaker on a high-up balcony, so that any attempt to make variations to it were off the agenda. It was mostly sentimental, other-age ephemera, which occasionally coincided with my own mawkish nostalgia of my youth. Then Silver Machine, came on. We weren’t even half a footprint on the metal side of the line, but it was one of those songs which formed the thread of our time. We, is me and Neil. Same age, same class at school from age six onwards, and both without brothers. It was never referenced this way at the time, but I guess we chose each other to fill that void.

Neil was a joiner, which I think he got from his strong-jawed mother; I had this sense that people who organised groups and societies were busy-body inadequates, which I definitely got from my pharisaical father. So, he was the energy behind our becoming members of Furness Film Society. Here’s how it went: in our little Lake District town there were two cinemas, each of which was as disinclined to show an arthouse movie, as they were to screen an old classic. But they both enforced with vigour, the rule about X-films being for eighteens and above only, especially on fourteen-year-olds. It was of no matter, the X-films they did show were appallingly low-brow. So, the Furness Film Society came into our orbit, which Neil had discovered in a leaflet left behind at one of his mother’s coffee mornings. It convened in the Civic Hall on the first Tuesday of every month for a three-day run, and worked by projecting films onto the plain white wall to one side of the main stage, and arranging those ubiquitous to public-buildings, brown, tubular metal and canvas chairs, to line up with it. As you approached our little corner of the vast auditorium, you met first a desk, at the head of the contrived central aisle between the banks of chairs, where you ID’d and paid your dues, and then, on the table behind that, the projectionist, and their kit. Then we slipped quietly to the front left, and melted into anonymity until the lights went down.

We were the only members under the age of twenty, but nobody mentioned it. I guess they thought that we were somebody’s sons, but I still like to think that they accepted us as a natural fit for whatever it was we were all doing. The programme was printed onto poor quality card, which you were given on payment of your joining fee; and that first season it listed: Les Parapluies de Cherbourg; A Bout de Souffle; Last Tango in Paris; and more importantly for us, Performance – an experience which would plant the seed of bohemianism within us which, from that moment, we nourished for all we were worth.

Similar people ran Furness Jazz Society (didn’t our naming conventions have a communist utilitarianism about them in those days?), and they took the same underground approach to checking age. This worked well, because their meetings were held in disused upstairs rooms of pubs. A faulty memory tells me that we joined them at the same time, but as I think about it again for perhaps for the first time since it happened, I sort of know that the Jazz Club must have come a year or so later. We must have looked a little closer to the legal age to drink alcohol, because we did drink a lot of beer during that period, and the Jazz Club was our only access to it. Mind you, most of the gigs were in remote Lake District pubs, and no one cared, because they knew that there was no chance of anyone who’d be inclined to enforce the law, likely to drop in. Many of them were somewhere in the wilderness, a bike ride away from a railway station, and early issues with our ability to metabolise alcohol, meant that we’d sometimes miss the last train and have to set off on a thirty-mile bike ride to make our beds before getting-up time on school nights.

Neil lived in a big rambling house, from which his mother conducted her social experiments, and his father was forever absent on a contract. And there were always tons of other children there, of whom Neil was but one, and was easily missed. He was always pushing for us to go straight to school, and to shower, prep, and do homework in the early hours before the drones, as he referred to them, started to arrive. My dominant parent was incurious and complacent, unlike Neil’s mum, who was merely vague; and his only real enthusiasm, as far as nurturing was concerned, was for spotting signs of terminal decline in his offspring, and the strict enforcement of petty rules that went with that. So, it was harder to go missing for me.

Getting up early, wasn’t forbidden though. Often, on non-club nights, we’d meet on the lanes up by the golf club at four or five in the morning. Sometimes by arrangement, sometimes coincidence. That’s where we learned to smoke a pipe. I wonder now what the early commuters made of us, two children, puffing away on a pipe in our jazz afficionado beige raincoats, as they dragged themselves in to make the early shift? If we ever received their unwanted attention, we used to give them a practised look of dumb insolence whilst subvocalising, “Never seen a bohemian before, mate?”

Why we were so attached to Silver Machine as a song back then? We knew ourselves to be of more refined tastes – our foundations were built in Delta Blues, not to mention that we were junior-jazzers by that stage, too; he went to guitar lessons, me, the piano, and we knew our way around a chord progression, but, dear me, that song. It got us, and we adopted it as ours.

I suppose it’s because it was the means by which we reached transcendence the first time we ever went up, and from then on, it was so associated with the experience that it came to define it. And here it was again, just as I was entering the realm for the first time in ages. Like it was a permanently forged link in my system that lay dormant until it was required to kick in, and chaperone me to a good place.

It all came tumbling back in a kaleidoscope of images. Us, in that little room, that could only be accessed through a crawl hole, high up in the eaves of his house, and which became our rehearsal room and retreat. Our first club room, perhaps. I could see us there still, as the song took over, and conveyed us, as one entity, on that forever ascending intro, onto another plain, from where we could look down on our earth-bound bodies, lying, as if fixed, on that patchwork of rugs and sleeping bags. Our new perspective confirming that we were safe in this rapture, which was ours to access whenever we desired it. Just fire up the song, and let it bring you…

But I still can’t figure it out. Did I experience a hard-wired psychological response to the music, or was it just a strange set of coincidences, to which I gave a significance that wasn’t really there? All I know for certain, is that for a little while during that lost afternoon, I accessed a small forgotten space again, and though the past is a very unhealthy place to live, recalling Neil and our adventures, it felt like I’d returned to the safest, happiest place I’ve ever known. And it’s where I re-met the real me. The me that has not yet been tainted by dread, and stained by regret. Someone who was free, and hadn’t yet been broken. I’ve carried stuff for so long now. Damaged by nurture to fear my failure to please others; trapped in that past of repeated errors, frozen by what-ifs.

I liked and admired that old me. And I know now, that I must return home. To myself. I am the light that lies buried beneath everybody else’s view of the world – that burden I’ve carried for so long. I am the observer, the soul, the awareness. I am not my mistakes.

Producers note:
Steady on Dickie, it sounds like you took a strong dose there. Readers: has Dickie discovered a safe crawl space he didn’t know was there? Or perhaps just a sense of what is valued, and was thought lost? Or are his delusions and faulty memory no more than the portal to the rabbit hole, from where he will slip from view? All this and more will be answered in the next exciting episode of Anthony Richard Delaheade White goes бlogging.

My view: Doll’s heed’s a cove.