One of the great seats of learning may have been a few short miles away.

An eternity on a bike but on clear Oxfordshire days the journey was the best.

Past Wendlebury, past Stella’s house, a journey I undertook many times back and forth.

Bicester in the winter felt desolate, days when all you wanted to do was go into town,

Down Sheep Street and look in the record shop, spend hours looking at one creative album sleeve

As the man behind the counter played the same music over and over again.

Each record I bought with money,

From a paper round I undertook I keep to this day, never having sold an album

For want of destroying a memory of you, I carried home with reverence, sometimes swinging

Over my arm when I forgot how precious my cargo was, no Ian Botham was I.

In thirty years I have thought of you often. I hated you to begin with, you weren’t my home but

Something changed, I discovered a life there and regretted leaving you even though I would have

Done eventually to be with another. I lived at the far end of town, Glory Farm Estate,

All new, shining houses, no guts, no glory, not then. A rabbit warren with no carrot for me to chase.

The closest pub two miles away in which the first beer I swigged,

With my father’s eye baring down on me and the landlord turning a blind one,

Keeping it close to my chest as we played darts, double top…on the beer,

A single fourteen on the board.

My close, named a Golf course, was miles from any friends, save

Lee but even he moved away after a while, meant that I wandered through more rabbit warrens

Past parks, dust bowls where football got played and teams were beaten time and time again

Down to Garth Park, by the time I was fifteen a place where not only was it close to

Drama classes

And plays, a different kind of play

To be part of but also to meeting girls for the first time properly, girls who liked to watch us

Play football and cheer and ask to take part. I kissed

You there, you tasted of ice cream

Whilst I sweated at kissing a beautiful girl and not because I imagined scoring

The winning goal at Garth Park on Wembley Way.

Bicester, with its long street, sometimes long faces in us kids as we had to go to

Oxford or Banbury to watch a film, the local Blockbuster did a roaring trade.

Sea Scouts was a distraction, never wanted to join the navy but had been

An avid canoeist, tackling gentle lake water, a fifteen year old macho wimp.

I gave that up at fifteen, it just didn’t thrill me anymore.

From the start of the eighties, we were kings of a small world, looking back

A nice world, a microcosm of a planet on a pinhead. The world

Became so much larger when we found our own way to far off places.

You all still live there, well mostly, some moved away, not far, not far enough.

I remember all those beautiful girls, all those fantastic footballers, ready to take on

All-comers. Garth Park with my pal Andy, Spurs fan, great dad, football in the dark.

Football at White Hart Lane.

My first serious love Laura still lives not far away, other friends have

Moved on and passed beyond the boundary…

Bicester, a small place with what I now know to have had a big heart.

Banbury Road, Sheep Street, the wimpy bar that seems so obsolete.

Goble’s fruit and veg shop, the hush of the graveyard and the taste of whisky

In the thousand pubs.

Bicester where I got my first black eye

And in return I nearly snapped his leg in half three years later on a football pitch.

Wait a long time for revenge.

The cold wind that sapped your strength on the three mile country run

And the only time I ever beat Gary W. and Ian B., the best runners by far

Billy D. and Tom M. with their good looks and easy charm, heroes both.

I didn’t appreciate you at the start,

By the time it was time to go, I cried for your passing.

We locked the door one last time and reversed out the close we had driven into

And bade

Farewell.

 

Ian D. Hall 2013