28-8-2021: Day 78
I was flying, suspended in mid-air, going full zero G’s, on a nerve-shredding fairground ride – the Vortex – in the Racecourse Park. Regretting the extra lunchtime hotdog, from a towering vertical bird’s eye view of the park, travelling at a zillion mph, I was musing over this choice of entertainment on this random family outing to my old stomping grounds in the Midlands.
Fairgrounds bring out the big kids, the banknotes and loose change. The fair had a sketchy, scally vibe and atmosphere. All masses and classes. All faces and races. Marauding teenage gangs and skinny tattooed ride operators with one eye on your wallet.
Weaving between the rigged hoop-a-prize games, drifting past the greasy burger caravans, this ‘Covid safe’ fun zoo was full of the old ghost trains of past, present, and future family day trips. And here we were, three generations together, splashing the dough at the amusements for old time’s sake.
29-8-2021: Day 79
The day after the Vortex, I was treading the wooden boards and corridors of time, relaxing and unwinding, in the old home of my childhood and adolescence in the Midlands. I was being pelted with a restless hail of long forgotten memories from the years turned to cobwebbed ages – rising in heavy thought clouds from every nook and cranny.
Secrets, recollections, and hidden worlds from a free-spirited childhood seemed to lurk in every shadow, smoulder under the wooden floorboards, troll under the darkened staircase, and breathe recollections from aged pieces of furniture unmoved for decades.
From a bygone black and white royalist painting suspended on the walls of time, to a literary treasure trove of a bookcase – my old home felt like a museum of curiosities – there to illustrate the gap in the generational game of life lived out between parents and their kids. The house of the rising son remained the house frozen in time.