They actually ended up being married now for 40 years so I guess they got it right in the end. They are a lovely devoted couple who when they met were painfully shy of each other although madly in love. They both thought that the other didn't like them because they baulked at a chaste goodnight kiss. They met again by accident 6 months later never forgetting how they had felt and the missed opportunity. They fell about laughing telling me the story of how they "almost didn't get together." They were very glad they did. And so was I.

A re-telling of Anderson's THE CONSTANT TOY SOLIDER in today's terms yoked together with a friend telling me of her early career as a child arsonist. "What was I thinking...?" she told me with tears in her eyes. "I loved that house...down to its mullions and final...but then...so did the flames. It was something I grew out of when I hit my teens....then it was all boys...boys...boys!"

***

Ahhh it's such an elemental memory for me...I can at a second's notice step back into it in an instant. I'd bawl my eyes out....the words....the melody....everything was real to me.

Couldn't possibly forget these songs and the singer...they stained my soul. She used to sing them very quietly and so soft and tender....even today they haven't been surpassed...they used to **** me. And when she got to the bit where "...he takes a strange ******* his knee and he tells her things that he once told me..." it was all much too much! I thought they were exquisite!

Her voice and that moment tied to her apron strings lives forever in my mind. It is a little jewel of time that has never diminished ever. I was too young to understand the brandy factor and could never understand how other people's cake and almond icing just couldn't get next or near to my sister's!.

it was just a left over toy of a London red bus that a tourist would buy...it would fit in your fist. It was just around and when she was teething she would gnaw at it...it became a security toy! She thought, I guess, that this was the normal size of a London bus so you can imagine her amazement when the real thing blossomed into being for the first time....the tiny toy had become a monster. She would gasp in wonder that things could be so. So just when she had got used to this then she saw a green bus for the first time and she equally couldn't believe that they could be any other colour than red! Then there was the time when the world went crazy and they're were double decker buses. She just kept coming out with the remarks and then the white bus threw everything she knew outta the window! Over 30 years later a white bus crossed my path and indeed it did look naked as a jaybird or as Tilly then put it- skinless!

I never thought of it again until now....there is no memory store I can go to in order to write a poem...it has to organically grow back into place and just the happenstance of a bus being driven to put on its paint clothes or to get dressed with logos kickstarted it all over again.

It the kind of thing a poet/father will take out of his wallet and show you an emotional picture of his daughter.

Enivrez-vous, Charles Baudelaire

Poem appeared in Le Spleen de Paris or Petits poèmes en prose (published posthumously, 1869). Translated (liberally!) by Jon Andrews.

Enivrez-vous.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867).

Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là: c’est l’unique question.

Pour ne pas sentir l’horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.

Mais de quoi? De vin, de poésie, ou de vertu, à votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous.

Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d’un palais, sur l’herbe verte d’un fossé, dans la solitude morne de votre chambre, vous vous réveillez, l’ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue,

demandez au vent, à la vague, à l’étoile, à l’oiseau, à l’horloge, à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui parle, demandez quelle heure il est;

et le vent, la vague, l’étoile, l’oiseau, l’horloge, vous répondront: “Il est l’heure de s’enivrer!

Pour n’être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous; enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise.

* * * * *

Drink.
Always be drunk. Therein lies everything: it’s all that matters.
So as not to feel the dread burden of Time breaking your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, never stop drinking.
But what? Whether wine, poetry or virtue, the choice is yours. Whatever: get drunk.
And if sometimes, on the palace steps, in the gutter’s green grass, or in the maudlin solitude of your room, you wake up, and the drunken haze has dwindled or gone,
then ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock; ask everything that flees, everything that groans, everything that moves, everything that sings, everything that speaks: ask them what time it is;
and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, and the clock will all reply:
“It is the drinking hour”.
To escape the fate of those tormented slaves of Time, get drunk.
Drink deep, never ceasing.
Whether wine, poetry, or virtue, the choice is yours.

***

The title comes from James Clarence Mangan's  "King Cahal Mór Of The Wine-Red Hand" which phrase would be known to anyone of my generation experiencing an Irish childhood.

I walked entranced
Through a land of Morn:
The sun, with wondrous excess of light,
Shone down and glanced
Over seas of corn
And lustrous gardens aleft and right.
Even in the clime
Of resplendent Spain,
Beams no such sun upon such a land;
But it was the time,
‘T was in the reign,
Of Cahal Mór of the Wine-red Hand.

And the refrain comes back again and again but changing all the time...

"And it is the time,
These be the days,
Of Cahal Mór of the Wine-red Hand.”

“It is now the time
These be the years,
Of Cahal Mór of the Wine-red Hand.”

"That I dreamed this dream
Of the time and reign
Of Cahal Mór of the Wine-red Hand."

But my love of this refrain is far far ahead of me as I am only three and a tree is just another being and the world blooms into my mind. I am totally in love with my world and the world is totally in love with me!