Recall

A weekend in London to detox and refresh because I’ve been in Holland too long. Five months without travel is longer than any sane person should take especially if the country is a three hour drive across.

Visiting old friends – partners in beer when we take our tentative teenage sips, forged music tastes together – WE WERE THERE – in bedrooms together sampling our first admirations of the Stereophonics (the world’s first because they were like totally unknown then) in progressive waves through Incubus (similarly way before they sold out) and the Strokes and after, comparing notes as Nick Drake, the Smiths and earlier tastes underpinning our own were devoured and notes taken.

We have evolved without changing much. Today we lie on backs swapping records until late. The latest records are David Sylvian, Johnny Flynn..iPods, .Spotify and Youtube standing in where CDs would suffice, I am not sure we’ve suffered much from the shift although vinyl still sounds like a tear cried by a lover compared to greasy fingers of music digitally produced. Much like if this blog were printed on 250 gm cotton parchment. Then it would read well!

Pubs and lazy days gathered in circles and relating to eachother on rooves, quoting passages of poems and swapping opinions on the state of affairs. It’s been a while since we tried these out on eachother. The opinions hardly change, but the colours have. Tories substituted for Blair, appreciation of tax systems finer but rhetoric just as stubborn, points more finely balanced but attitudes the same.

We are just 28 but these nostalgia trips crach like celebration rockets through a life made almost totally new. The staggering pace of the newly made trodden down a side alley and found the remnants of what made me in the past, is still informing me now. Am I really so little different?

Evolved but hardly changed.

~@~

Red Elk said “Time is not real. But the seasons are.”