“Love, oh love, careless love”
– Everyone looks beautiful at the funfair,
even the man who runs the waltzer
Thanks to Bessie Smith for the song & Carter’s Steam Fair for the flashback moment.
But it wasn’t Bessie Smith I was thinking of when we walked up to the funfair with the grandchildren today. I’ve spent a rainy week cooking preserves and reading the kind of Chinese poetry that weaves impermanence and loss into a robe. If I had to choose an avatar right now it would be this heron; a bit solitary; cranky; often alone; watching and listening.
Something powerful and irreversible lit up in my mind the first time I heard the Everly Brothers sing Cathy’s Clown, above the roar of the generators spilling across Rodway Hill in the dark from Rogers’ travelling fair. It was an old school fairground, rich with diesel fumes and pheromones; a daze of intense movement and light surrounded by summer nightfall and scary as hell. I don’t think I’d ever felt so alone or so alive before. ‘If this is what growing up is like‘, I thought, ‘bring it on‘.
It was my first lesson in loss; going back the next day to find nothing but tyre tracks and patches of yellow grass. RIP Don Everly it was your best ever performance..
Like this:
Like Loading...
Related
Author: Dave Pole
I've spent my life doing a lot of things, all of them interesting and many of them great fun.
When most people see my CV they probably think I'm making things up because it includes being a rather bad welder and engineering dogsbody, a potter, a groundsman and bus driver. I taught in a prison and in one of those ghastly old mental institutions as an art therapist and I spent ten years as a community artist. I was one of the founding members of Spike Island, which began life as Artspace Bristol. ! wrote a column for Bristol Evening Post (I got sacked three times, in which I take some pride) and I worked in local and network radio and then finally became an Anglican parish priest for 25 years, retiring at 68 when I realised that the institutional church and me were on different paths.
What interests me? It would be easier to list what doesn't, but I love cooking and baking with our home grown ingredients. I'm fascinated by botany and wildlife in general, and botanical illustration. We have a camper van that takes us to the wild places, we love walking, especially in the hills, and we take too many photographs.
But what really animates me is the question "what does it mean to be human?". I've spent my life exploring it in every possible way and the answer is ..... well, today it's sitting in the van in the rain and looking across Ramsey Sound towards Ramsey Island. But it might as easily be digging potatoes or making pickle, singing or finding an orchid or just sitting. But it sure as hell doesn't mean getting a promotion, beasting your co-workers or being obsequious to power, which ensured that my rise to greatness in the Church of England flatlined 30 years ago after about 2 days. But I'm still here and still searching for that elusive sweet spot, and I don't have to please anyone any more.
Over the last 50 or so years we've had a succession of gardens, some more like wildernesses when we were both working full-time, but now we're back in the game with our two allotments in Bath.
View all posts by Dave Pole
I didn’t know you were an Everly bros fan always my favourite with harmony , we saw them when they appeared in the Colton hall sat in the choir area and had a special wave from them , bliss of young love !!
Not so much a fan Anne – they were the soundtrack to the years of unfocused longing.