Here I sit broken hearted, paid a penny and only f.. well you all know the end of that Limerick. Cisterns of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.
I read these two and many more over 50 years ago in public lavatories (Lavatories not cottages). It’s a failing I know but these days I do keep looking back. I am at the stage where people that I grew up with are starting to die. I did think before using that word but there is no better, euphemisms, like irony, can be misleading. I do not mean a lot of contemporaries have died, but one or two people have. The strange thing is that the usual, in the past, utterance would have been “he didn’t get very long” or “She had a short innings poor thing”, or “He was too young”, are no longer said; we are at a dying age and each one that slips over the edge is half expected and nothing unusual it seems. Add to this the number that are on multiple pills or multiple by-passes and the future is not really there any more; it is about survival and is almost a contest that usurps all other contests, Who will be the last one still “In”. And yet, and yet, when you read an interview with a ‘100 year old’ they all say more or less the same thing; I am alone, no one else knows what I am referring to when I reminisce and speak of the, for me, recent past.
The funeral tomorrow is for an old neighbour who was the contemporary of my parents and is the last to go in the old neighbourhood. Her passing after more than 90 years means the old street is no longer; it’s gone, it does not exist. they have all moved onward and upward. I went for a look around and the only things unchanged are the steel grates in the paths where access to water or drains is. Those pieces of cast Iron or steel are the only unchanged markers left. The only connection that I can feel with my past. They tell a story, no, many stories to me but are already writing new ones that the authors, like me 50 years ago, do not know that they are writing.
Farewell Mrs H, we may meet up again one day.