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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13818
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Who was it who said "The past is another country; they do things differently there?" Maybe I've misquoted, but no matter.
I went today to the river, for a picnic. I was opposite the first sailing club I ever joined. My wife, my son, and I. To be fair it was meant to be a date with my wife, and we weren't going there at all. But sons have to be collected from parties and fed, so he joined us.
A lot happened in my life with that sailing club. This summer is 34 years after I joined it, 34 years after I bought my first boat, 33 years after I persuaded the boy I then adored to join me and sail with me.
"Ah," you are thinking, "it all came flooding back, then." But no, it didn't.
Instead I felt a very peculiar and unemotional detatchment. I didn;t tell my family what went through my head. I did feel a gentle sadness that I had so loved him that I had treated him badly just because his skills could not live up to my expectations (I'd wanted the illusory "us" to be wonderful and all conquering. Then, surely, he would love me back?). I felt a little foolish, and just a little old and grey.
And oddly I also felt a comfort, that he is still, after almost two years of being free from the obsession, still in my past. And he used to be in my present.
I saw odd things. A boat that was 40 or more years old competing oin level terms with ones built yesterday, and leading the fellt. Amazing. I saw my odl family doctor, now very grey haired, sailing single handed in a small dinghy thathe built for his sons in his dining room. I saw a grey haired shock of hair that used to be a dark brown shock of hair on a pompous professor (who had the sexiest son, I remember from that time ago).
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be, that's for sure.
I think I showed myself today that some of the things we thing are everlasting actually tarnish over time. I saw clearly why I left that club and moved on. Ditch crawling in no wind was really rather awful. But it was th eclub closest to hime, and my father would drive me there. And wait grumpily if I was late to depart.
I wonder why I waited so long to grow up.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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