This weekend I went on a mens' spiritual retreat. To Alnmouth Friary. About a million things happened, or rather I had about a million thoughts about things that happened.
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| Where are we going again? And what is it we're looking for? |
The theme of the weekend was 'the still, small voice'. I am surmising that the idea behind this was to sit around being quiet for a bit, so that we'd be open to hearing the 'still, small voice' of God. That's all very well in theory, but in my case this weekend my internal monologue was so deafening, stomping around noisily in massive clown shoes and shouting through a loud hailer, so full of stories and reminiscences that I barely stopped to listen for any other sounds (actually I did a little bit, but I'll put that in Part 2).
I suppose I got a strong sense this weekend of the cycles that life goes in, and there were so many references to 1986 / 1987 on the trip. Those were the two years when my life started on the path it's on now, and in many ways despite the 28 years in between I feel I'm back at the same crossroads, with the same choices to make all over again, except with a few more aches and pains.. It's a bit like the 28 year long equivalent of trying to get out of Kirkby Stephen in a thunderstorm in 2007, where thanks to my complete lack of navigational skills we managed to cycle for 7 miles and for an hour along roads which were under water, only to find we'd been going round in a big circle and ending up back again in Kirkby Stephen, soaked to the skin, and with shoes full of water (it's a metaphor for life!).
Anyway, this weekend I found myself in a car going north in a VW Passat on the A1 listening to Road to Nowhere, in 1986 I was in a mini going south on the M1 to Nottingham when the same song came on. I was going to a university open day there with my friend Andrew. We were visiting separate departments so we didn't go round together for the whole day, but part way through the day I passed his car and the lights were on (it had been raining when we set off, but dried out and he hadn't noticed they were still on). No way of contacting him (mobile phones were still walkie talkies), this could be bad, I thought.
Sure enough, when we met again around 4 pm the car wouldn't start. I think we may have tried to jump start it. Then in one of those dreamlike sequences that you think you must have imagined, 4 very attractive female medical students pulled up next to us in an almost identical Mini and asked us if we needed any help. They even had jump leads! That would have been good, except when we put the cars back to back to use them (old Minis had the battery in the boot), Andrew realised the boot key was still in Leeds with his dad...
Anyway, the girls gave us their address and said if we were stuck later, to call and see them...by this time the only way to get into the boot was to get a new key from the local Mini dealership but they were closed till the morning...so we went to find the girls' house. They invited us in, and they let us use their landline to phone our parents...one of them (from Ireland) thought it would be absolutely hilarious if just at the point when I was trying to explain to my mum that I was stuck in Nottingham she would shout 'Oh, Jonathan, put the phone down and come back to bed, will you!'....
Although they were all very attractive, my favourite one was called Honey (I'm not even making this up), I guess if you can be in love based on one viewing only, in the style of Jack Palance in City Slickers, I was that night. Actually the same thing happened me again recently, at a church fair in October, when I fell in love with someone who looked a little bit like Geena Davis, who was queuing up to buy some soup and sandwiches, and despite having to wade her way through a bewildering queueing system manned by deaf geriatrics, which had left me a sweaty mess just to get a slice of apple pie and a coffee, she managed to exude style and poise during the whole thing, even managing to calm her two children and elderly mother from a distance, who were waiting for the soups...but that's another story. Actually, it isn't. That's it, in its entirety.
There is of course a fantasy ending to the story of Andrew and myself and the 4 female medical students in a house for the night, which you can make up for yourself if you want to, but the reality was something else.
Honey and her friends had some male friends in another house who were away for the night, and we slept there, in an empty house (I don't think anyone fantasises about this sort of ending), we got the key the next morning from the Mini dealership, borrowed jump leads from the Physics Department at the Uni, and got back to Leeds in time for afternoon lessons the next day. By this time, the story had got round of us being stuck overnight in a house with 4 medical students (all our classmates seemed to have chosen a variation on the fantasy ending), but never one to pretend, I sadly had to tell them that nothing happened...probably based on this incident, I ended up choosing to go to Nottingham Uni, but that didn't work out too well either...
Shortly after this trip to Nottingham, aged 17 and a bit tired of most of my friends having girlfriends and me not having one, I formed a group called On the Shelf (a group as in a collection of people, not as in a band). There were three of us (myself, Fraser and Ben). The timing was pretty good because it was just before Valentine's Day, and there was a Valentine's Ball coming up at Leeds Girls' High School, which we planned to go to. This was in the mid 80s, internet dating wasn't even a glimmer of shiny in the long distant future... It wasn't long after the film 'Desperately Seeking Susan' had been out. We thought it would be a great idea to turn ourselves into a 3 man advertising hoarding by having the words 'Desperately Seeking Someone' ironed onto 3 matching white shirts and wearing them in formation at the Valentine's Ball. Even that didn't go quite to plan, as two of us got girlfriends before the night anyway, but we still wore the shirts. In fact, although I'd been seeing a girl called Joanne for about a week before the Ball, that night was the first time we held hands or kissed (Ahhh!).
Possibly the thing you want to happen least immediately after you've had your first kiss with a new girlfriend on Valentine's Day aged 17 is to get picked up by coach and sent to Italy on a rugby tour for a week, but that's what happened to me. I left at midnight with the rest of the pumpkins, and for the next week, apart from a couple of payphone calls to Joanne, I had to just wonder what was going to happen next. The story of the rugby tour, in particular my Rambo impersonation can be found here
What did happen next was me embarking on an intense 9 month relationship, during which I deferred my entry to Uni, and took a year out (Germany 1987 there's more about that trip here). Before this relationship some of my friends had described me as in incurable romantic. I thought there was just one special person for everyone and when you met them you'd just know. Well, lucky old me, at aged 17, I'd met her already, and I was going to live happily ever after, in a rosy tinted future full of furry bunnies, and fluffy clouds (actually I might be confusing it with being dead)...
However, my notions of incurable romanticism were processed through that relationship like clothes through a mangle (ask your parents if you've never seen one). It turned out that Joanne was the cure. By November I'd been dumped. We did meet for a final time in March 1987 (I think we went to see Children of a Lesser God about a man trying to communicate with a deaf and dumb girl which wasn't unlike the rest of the evening) before I left for Germany. She had the shutters up towards me so completely it was like being out with an ice sculpture for the evening. I think we had the 'let's stay friends' conversation, but I think what that actually translated as was 'I hope you get shot into space, and never come back'.
I even got the wrong bus home after that evening, and had to walk about 3 miles home in a thunderstorm where the trees were almost snapping in half all around me. At the time I was reading a story called 'The Cyclone' by Hermann Hesse about a young boy, who's about to leave home for the first time. In the story the cyclone had smashed up his home town and changed it forever and he now had to go out on his own 'to become a man, to stand up against life, whose first shadows had grazed me in these days'. I guess I felt the same at the time.
Well, here I am aged 45, I've been grazed by plenty of shadows in the intervening 28 years, I guess I'm still standing up against life, with mixed success. I'm still seeking, although these days I don't go around with felt letters on the back of a shirt, advertising myself to the opposite sex (you can advertise yourself online now, different levels of subscription are available).
NB. Just an update on the other two members of On The Shelf. Fraser lives in Sydney with a beautiful wife and 3 beautiful daughters, Ben lives in Newcastle with a wife and 2 children (I haven't seen the photos, I'm sure they're beautiful too)....somehow the shelf is empty now, except for me....
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| Here's me sending out the wrong signals... |
I'm not sure the tagline 'Desperately Seeking Someone' sends out the right signals anymore, if it ever did...probably something about the word desperately, which was of course, you've guessed it, my word.
Now, all these memories came flooding back to me, just out of hearing one song on the radio. And I haven't even started on the weekend yet. At this point I'm still in the car on the way up the A1, and it's still Friday night...
To be continued....
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