Wanderlust - Travelling Eternity Road

Like everyone else I’ve been at home for months with little prospect of going anywhere. Luckily, I don’t mind. I’m happy and safe at home, or at my place of work for a couple of days a week. Over time, I’ve become so contented at home that I dread going out to anywhere busy. Social media showed pictures of Blackpool taken this Bank Holiday weekend of the crowded promenade, not a face-mask in sight. I don’t see the resort as getting back on its feet after lockdown, I just see fear, but that’s my problem to overcome. In a few weeks I will be travelling over the border into my beloved Dumfries & Galloway and our home from home – pandemic permitting. I’ll be fine, doing my own thing, keeping to my own space and allowing my wanderlust to take me into Galloway Forest and the quiet, hidden beaches along the Solway Firth. I will have plenty of face-masks.

My photo: somewhere on the west coast of South Uist

I wish we had a motor home or a camper van. In my wanderlust dreams I pack it with everything we need and set off, northbound, stopping wherever the fancy takes us, then destination, the Outer Hebrides. It is another world. We could stay as long as we like and be more relaxed about it. Up to now, our trips have been governed by annual leave and it isn’t long enough, even with a bank holiday tagged on the end. Things will change soon. Time will be our own and we’ll be able to just go for it – pandemic, lockdown and personal worries aside.

Back in the good old days when The Moody Blues did a UK tour, we’d be with them, going to places we otherwise wouldn’t go. I suppose that was a form of wanderlust, even though we booked everything in advance and knew exactly where we were going and for how long. We were ‘Travelling Eternity Road’ if you like, including Manchester Apollo, or now I think it is called O2, we would drive home from there; London would be part of a sight-seeing holiday, Birmingham, got to be in their home city, often where the last concert would be, and anywhere else we could factor in. Lots of concerts over many years. It was always worth it.

If I felt ready to mingle with the rest of society, I would have travelled to Wembley, supporting Blackpool F.C. in their successful play-off final against Lincoln City. Instead, I watched on TV at home. Feeling stressed and holding my breath for the most of ninety-odd minutes isn’t healthy. In my house there were shrieks, screams, tears and much applause. The neighbours knew we were home.

I found this, by Alfred Joyce Kilmer:

Roofs
(For Amelia Josephine Burr)

The road is wide and the stars are out
and the breath of the night is sweet,
And this is the time when wanderlust should seize upon my feet.
But I'm glad to turn from the open road and the starlight on my face,
And to leave the splendour of out-of-doors for a human dwelling place.

I never have seen a vagabond who really liked to roam
All up and down the streets of the world and not to have a home:
The tramp who slept in your barn last night and left at break of day
Will wander only until he finds another place to stay.

A gypsy-man will sleep in his cart with canvas overhead;
Or else he'll go into his tent when it is time for bed.
He'll sit on the grass and take his ease so long as the sun is high,
But when it is dark he wants a roof to keep away the sky.

If you call a gypsy a vagabond, I think you do him wrong,
For he never goes a-travelling but he takes his home along.
And the only reason a road is good, as every wanderer knows,
Is just because of the homes, the homes, the homes to which it goes.

They say that life is a highway and its milestones are the years,
And now and then there's a toll-gate where you buy your way with tears.
It's a rough road and a steep road and it stretches broad and far,
But at last it leads to a golden Town where golden Houses are.

                                                                     Alfred Joyce Kilmer (1886 - 1918)

Thanks for reading, take care if you're out there, Pam x

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A thrilling finale

On Saturday night the people of Great Britain voted a dancing dog to be the most talented act in the country. They deemed a dancing dog fit to parade in front of royalty in Jubilee year. They gave light to the bleakest of talentless nutcases that it can be done whilst plunging the nation into what will hopefully in two weeks be regarded as shame.

If you enjoyed the dancing pooch, fair play to you the first time, I did myself. The second time. The third time? To think that this is the pinnacle of talent the island has to offer annoys me. I hope then, that maybe the people who should have didn't bother auditioning (as always seems the case).

Back in the real world, yesterday saw Man City pull off their first Premiership title win in my lifetime. I sat there as most people did thinking the blue half of Manchester had thrown it all away, that QPR had done a job and that somewhere in the madness of it all everything had flipped on a knife edge. The whistles started to go in around the country, with Mancini time still being played at the Etihad and would you believe it, they smash two in and steal the title back from United's noses. By the time the papers are opened tomorrow, the whole thing will be relegated to statistics (and the top half all ended the day exactly where they started it).

Last year I sang beyond the final whistle at Old Trafford as Blackpool were relegated. The pride, the glory of it all and then the disappointment were all a little bit too much and, unsurprisingly, there were tears. That day inspired me to write the Dreamland poem when the Dead Good Poets were seeking submissions for the Blackpool anthology. This weekend, with a blog post in mind, I found myself thinking football poems again. Light and Dark is our theme for the week, and though a little rushed through, this is where I went with it.



We talked of legends for hours. Always legends. 


In the playgrounds we traded icons like stickers
Your Lee for my Matthews, some other kid's Law.
We played cup final day in the alleys back then, every night
we played pens with one poor sod on stones. 


Those were the days, in the days of our elders
the legends of their youth, the nothings of ours
the light we hold up in their memory brings darkness
overshadowed by heroes, here a long time before.


You talked then of fortress Maine Road, you went down
and I laughed as United swept off with the league
and my lot milled along: results read out last, goals never shown
but just three quid in each gave us somewhere to go.


Nobody told us back then, as young boys, that the games
we built childhoods on course through the veins of the men
who remember Maine Road on a wet Tuesday night-
with that tunnel out back, being penned in through spite. 


The Blue Moon never rose in my lifetime before-
at one point I doubted that it would endure through the dark
then from somewhere, as legend, came Keegan to steer
then Sven, Hughes, Mancini- one to make his name here


Glass eyed fan on the telly, I'm glad you've now won
Enjoy it, think of all the grounds the lads have been on
This was one for the memory bank, no shame now in tears
Light has come from those dark days, light to hold up for years. 



Thanks for reading,
Shaun.

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