The week passed like lightning. From tears at a seeing young severely disabled boy in a fancy dress wheelchair at Whitley Bay Carnival, through visiting my close schoolfriend Andy's mum, still robin-like and funny at the age of 94 (on the waiting list for heart bypass surgery, an ideal candidate according to her surgeon); through a plane flight back from gorgeous Spain accompanied by two junior football teams, the smell of teenage boy farts and the chaos of lending phones, bouncing on seats, shouting in just-broken voices blending with the air turbulence to make the flight seem like journey in a duvet filled with cats; through Attila the Stockbroker's boutique (he'd hate the term) festival with a deeply-mooing bull duetting with a trumpet in the first band's soundcheck, surviving being hugged by notorious Brightonian Smelly, feeling like I'd done a fab gig and driving back in the dark exhausted, diverted off the M27; through getting back to Robert and Edith's message saying they'd played McCookerybook and Rotifer's Balloon to a crowd of 1500 people at an antifascist rally in Salzburg.
Oh windy, sandy north-east coast and fish and chips, oh chilled horchata through a straw, oh stripy bent-beaked hoopoes cracking insects just a few centimetres from our feet, oh lusty-voiced male-heavy audiences singing along to my song At The Bathing Pond and a woman hooting with laughter at the line 'In a gap between the bushes...'.
Oh bands, music, musicians with your/our foibles and Venn-diagram overlaps of life and experiences. Oh extraordinary art and artists, a world to rejoin and explore.
Oh life, I love you.
I won't open the dark cupboard door, even as it grows larger and more full and tries to press me into testing my resilience.
'Just one little look won't hurt!'.
It will, and I won't do it.
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I want to be you
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