“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
That’s a lovely quote, from L. P. Hartley. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have written a lovely line like that and to hear people saying it, hear it repeated down the days?
He was bang on the money with that one, old Hartley, and summed it all up so well. We can look at the souvenirs and our photographs, we can dredge up memory upon memory but aren’t we best off doing all this from our side of the border? We can never really go back, in really real life I mean, so shouldn’t we leave well alone and carry on making new memories for ourselves?
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and that is as far as i got with my blog. i had high hopes for it when i started it a few days ago; look! i even started using capital letters and everything and i had resolved to use them in the future as i turned myself, inside my chrysalis, from henry the thirst into Henry Ex.
but then i got tired.
i got so tired, right in my bones. i was tireder than a screaming toddler on a supermarket floor. i was more tired even than a dance marathon shuffler. i got diabolically, diabetically tired.
my blog was going to discuss the wisdom (or lack of it) in chasing up people from the past and trying to puff some life into the nearly corpse of an old friendship and to say, Well Hey!, that auld acquaintances should NOT be forgot and i can prove it!
what happened was that i had been sleuthing in google for someone i used to know but had lost contact with and i turned up a direct hit on my old friend. i found some writing of his and i sent an email to the publisher of the site. but would finding my old friend prove to be a good idea?
you see, i’ve done this before. i have been friendsreunited with people from my past and then realised that that was where they would prefer to keep me, in the past. and that can be a bit hard to deal with, like going on a first date and then realising that there isn’t going to be another. not that you did anything wrong or anything but that you just didn’t hit it off, you didn’t click this time around and thanks but no thanks have a nice rest of your life. the past IS a foreign country.
but i have a bit of a mission that’s all to do with my missing life, my drowned life, and so i try to rescue fragments sometimes and see what i can knit from them. it seems a bit unfair that i have to risk my memories and my feelings but i think it’s worthwhile because if i don’t look then i can’t find, and that would be a waste. so it might be painful for me, behaving like this, i might get knocked back, i might learn that someone whose memory i hold dear and who is a vital part of my mythology in ghost form doesn’t want to know me any more. to them i’m dead and they want me to stay buried. i am a ghost and they don’t want me haunting them.
this is the car that bob and i managed to abandon in atlantic road. we go back a long way you see, that picture was taken in 1981. would he want to see me again? and how would i feel if he didn’t want to know about me and if our friendship had burned out and been scrapped?
but, like i say, i’m tired so i’m going to cut this blog short, far shorter than it deserves. i’m due at the diabetic clinic so i’ve been keeping my blood/sugars low. when i do this i get hypos and i feel like i’ve been beaten up. because i feel ill i get a bit depressed and start pondering my own mortality and it goes on and on and on.
the potted version is this:
we met up and had a great day. he is my friend. he is the same person. he makes me think. he makes me laugh. he makes me happy.
and i’d like YOU to meet my friend, bob, too. he’s just started a blog and you can find it here.
i’m sorry i haven’t blogged myself for aaaaages and i’m sorry for feeling sorry for myself. i had a filling today too and i just feel like i’m falling apart.
but then i would feel tired, wouldn’t i? for i have been a busy boy, i have been away and visited a foreign country and come back again. with a smile on my face.
goodnight.
