styx

just came across this last night when I was going through old stuff from my short stay at Ruskin College in Oxford. The college had a small green space with quite simply the largest Silver Birch tree I had ever seen. And I mean huge, I'd only ever seen the average size Silver Birches one normally sees. This was the size of an Oak. There was a bench surrounding it and I spent many an evening under it doing 2 of my favourite things; gettting drunk and watching people. I went in one Monday morning and it was gone!!!!!!! Nowt, nothing, nyada. (Oh I love trees by the way.) The context is important here: It was the afternoon class and we had to listen to people reading what I felt to be rather tame and dull prose and poetry. People were drifting off but I was fuming about the tree. We were given the task of writing a few lines about something that was on your mind at the moment. Nice one. People were falling asleep: It came to my turn. I barked:

ME, BO A DUCHESS AND THE FLAMINGO It is summer 1963. I was up early, it was a beautiful day, but I was as mad as hell. I'd had an argument with my girlfriend the night before; I was seventeen and just didn't understand women. She was sixteen and quite obviously didn't understand men. Well young men anyway. I knew what I had to do. Go and buy some records. I threw on my American Levi's which had a button fly and were faded and beginning to go at the knees. I had a thick leather belt with a huge buckle. Was I at the cutting edge of sartorial grungeness! No. I threw on a red t-shirt and a red and blue cardigan that my mother had knitted me - which was now misshapen - to top off this ensemble. Oh although it was summer I was wearing a pair of large winter woolly socks that my Grandmother had knitted me.