Anecdotage

 I haven’t written one of these posts for months, thanks largely to the insidious, incompetent, mendacious and censorious process via which the British Establishment, Brussels, NATO, MSM media and umpteen neocon unelected State security agencies have been trying to crush the voters’ will. So tonight it is a blessed relief and release to return to a gentler age – and reminiscence of when the World was young.

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Without any question of doubt, the truly formative years of my life were from 1957 to 1963. Although I was only nine years old at the start of that brief period, I was 2015 years old by the end of it.

For in that brief sextet of time, a singing duo from Country and Western music invaded rock n roll, the football team I loved (and Buddy Holly) were wiped out in plane crashes, my first love affair had been shattered (she left me for an older man), the world nearly blew itself up over Cuba, the Beatles happened, and the US President I idolised was assassinated.

Calling that a roller coaster is like writing Krakatoa off as a fart. And yet oddly – because we are individuals, and thus the personal shock stays with us while the macro trend fades – the singing duo and the love affair were the things that really shaped me. Sixty years on, blurred videos of Kennedy press conferences and Beatles appearances on Granada TV are still there enabling me to relive the excitement of those improbable times when the impossible seemed possible. But the singing duo and the love affair are the only things entwined in bitter-sweet living memory: they alone are for evermore.

The Everly Brothers crashed the music party that was my radar in 1957 with Bye-Bye Love, Wake up Little Susie, and Dream. Until then, my brother held sway over the record player with Bill Haley and Elvis Presley. After that, he had to compete with the Everlys, Buddy Holly and Little Richard.

Dream came out as my prepubescent baby love was at its height. But the Everly’s later hit So sad to see good love go bad coincided with my move on to Grammar School, and my  first love’s obsession with another bloke already at that institution. Bizarrely, ten years later she took up with him again – and they married.

Maybe some of you can understand why the quintessentially naff lyrics of this song  completely tore up a 12 year old at the time:

We used to have good times together
But now I feel them slip away
It makes me cry to see love die
So sad to watch good love go bad

Remember how you used to feel dear?
You said nothing could change your mind
It breaks my heart to see us part
So sad to watch good love go bad

Is it any wonder
That I feel so blue
When I know for certain
That I’m losing you

Remember how you used to feel dear?
You said nothing could change your mind
It breaks my heart to see us part
So sad to watch good love go bad
So sad to watch good love go bad

Time is of course relative, but when you’re 12 years old everything beautiful is meant to be forever. The fact that it isn’t is something which, I have to admit, has taken me a lifetime to contain.

The girl’s name was Linda Mordin. For Valentine’s Day in 1959, everyone in our primary school class had to compose a poem to their favoured one. Mine contained these less than immortal lines:

Oh my darling Linda Mordin

For you I would go fightin’ and swordin’ 

Robert Burns, eat your heart out.

Linda survived the (eventually) disastrous marriage to my rival, had two lovely kids, and became a much admired Special Needs schoolteacher. She died of cancer in 2012.

Like I said, Time is relative….and even its speed is endlessly variable. To take me back to the heartache of 1960, the only thing required is the opening sequence of So sad to see Good Love go bad. On hearing the song, I am a melancholy kid again: vulnerable, confused, seeing the world once more as a place more hurtful and dangerous than I wanted it to be.

There are those who would tell you that achieving ‘maturity’ is about the acceptance of pain as inevitable, and disappointment as the price we must all pay in the process of ‘being adults’.

There is some truth in this, but there is no One Size Fits All for the human condition. Too much acceptance of what is begets cynicism and crushes hope.

I have kept with me over the years a mantra, and it is this: growing old is obligatory, but growing up is optional.

The inability to accept what is real is the curse that separates one ‘side’ from another in our culture. But the willingness to strive for what could be is what keeps us from accepting the mediocrity of totalitarian ideology.

My outlook on life comes with a degree of suffering. The highs, however, are worth a million self-deceptive compromises.