14th/19

Napowrimo 2022

DAY #19

BUBBLY AS CHAMPAGNE

UNFINISHED POEM (part two)

Something old something new something borrowed something blue (something's gone wrong)

And the wedding cake blues goes on eat it for England eat your heart out

If you ever travel to the Pearl of the Orient you'll like this

Total recall is a bit like that too but can be really boring

You see the trouble is it drags on and pulls you back into the past

Random photograph's on an online blog site and one pops up of me

Fifty years old but everybody recognises me straight away

Sitting here in the provinces two hundred miles north of Manila

Drinking Red Horse after dark in the Kubo echo's of camping out

We go everywhere all of the time always have done always will do

Torquay Newquay Weymouth Blackpool Lytham Saint Anne's (and the North Wales coast)

Later but not much The Isle of Man Jersey Brittany St Malo

Normandy and the cider farms camping out in the apple orchards

We would jump the trains down to London from Manchester Piccadilly

To watch City play at Palace Chelsea Spurs West Ham and Arsenal

Got caught a few times but in those days you could give a dodgy address

Used to go up the Kings Road and Sloane Square never bought anything though

Jean Junction denim was king tie died tee shirts matching shirt and tie sets

The swinging sixties if you said you were there you probably were not

We were only kids but we had a freedom that kids today don't have

We could go away for days weeks and months sometimes without recompense

We hitched a lift got a ride from Stockport all the way to the big smoke

Then got a bed in the partitioned off bit of the Sally Army

It was in the transport part at Elephant and Castle stank of wazz

I bought a brand new towel and after washing at the communal sinks

I turned around and the towel was gone what a welcome to London town

You don't make the same mistake twice then it was off to hear the message

The Captain spoke about Barnardo's the shoe shines and the phossy girls

We've come a long way in a hundred years he said but much more to do

After prayers we went for the bacon and egg breakfast in the big hall

We knew all the jibs in London in those days and went to Centre Point

They gave us luncheon vouchers which we cashed in for cigarettes and Coke

At Saint Martins in the fields the vicar there gave us the train fare home

The seventies merged into the eighties and came and went so quickly

We knew everybody who was anybody and nobody cared

Almost all of the time we were too drunk to know who or where we were

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