Perfect Day

It is a perfect day outside today. There is an autumn sun that isn't fierce but still warms, a breeze that carries a warning of winter but for now cools and makes the leaves rustle and a blue sky that speaks of clarity and joy. I love days like this - when I used to live out in the country this would a day for taking the dogs and some bags and going foraging for blackberries and sloes for several hours, coming back scratched and stained with purple berry juice, the dogs tired and happy and that feeling of being at one with the season that only autumn really allows.

In America this is the Fall - when the leaves turn and the post lapsarian wilderness  is at its most beautiful. I remember going camping with Jon and Angus - right the way up through Wisconsin to the Canadian border and the Voyageurs National Park. It was cold but the lakes were breathtaking in their autumn splendour and, for me, the whole trip was made worthwhile by seeing a large bear lumbering through the forest. When we got back to Eau Claire we discovered that three campers not a mile from us had been killed that weekend - by a bear! It served to make us realise that the wilderness in the USA is just that  - not some theme park for a weekend jolly.

I love wild places - their mystery and romance and I loved living on the edge of nowhere. Odd, considering my formative years were spent in one of the most densely populated cities on earth But the thing about Calcutta was that you were only ever a few hour's car ride from country - paddy fields and villlages a million miles and a hundred years removed from the city. Gail and I used to imagine we would have a little house out near Dum Dum. There would be fields for  her horses and I would have a flock of goats and chickens. How strange that she now has a farm and I, for a brief period, had the chickens and the yard to rear them. I had forgotten about it until I started to write this and then the memory came flooding back.

We would sit under the trees at Tolly and plan  our adult lived incessantly. They always were presupposed to be in India - we both loved it so. And it must have been on cold weather days because the memory comes complete with that cold weather sky - the same colour as it is here today and the same whisper in the trees that I hear outside the window now.

My friend Roshni has gone home - to see her father who is not very well - and I was suffused with jealousy. She is there now as I write and I envy her so. But you  know, it may  be better to keep my  Calcutta in my head - a place of the soul and heart rather than destroy it with reality. I am not a fan of reality at the moment.

A Tale of Love and Obsession

Ok - enough about other people - back to ME!


This was going to be about my hopeless love for a glorious singer in a band. I though I would never be in touch with him again and therefore could write about him with impunity - shock, horror, I  think I've found him on Facebook!


Oh well, unlikely he'll accept my friend request and even more unlikely that he will ever read this as indeed unlikely as my other subject is to ever see any of this! I'm tempting fate but I do want them to get in touch.


Ok - so here's the thing. I have never been very good at relationships - if they liked me I was bored quickly, if they didn't I could pine for years! So it was with these two young men. I was also always attracted by glamour, the blessed ones, the golden ones. The absolutely and completely unobtainable ones, ever, without a doubt, they would never look at me.


You see the problem, and perhaps understand why at 55 I  have no partner or lover or very few romantic memories. Perhaps that is why I am addicted to rom coms. Who knows? This is not a please pity me blog by the way - just how it was and is. Does not mean that I was celibate, virginal or anything other than a child of the sixties. Sex was one thing - love quite another.


Let us begin this journey of tribulation. Really the first love was a third member of the group - Peter Yeti, oh could sing - to this day I cannot hear Mustang Sally without a shiver running down my spine. He was the kindest - accepting of the adoration - always letting me down gently. And, if I was sad he would sing a song his father had taught him, "Old Stewball was a Racehorse", it always made me laugh. And that is interesting because the other two really never did make laugh. I still love Peter, he was a blessed soul cursed with growing up in an environment that was hostile to his race, and cursed with a talent that here in the sixties would have made him famous - in Calcutta simply notorious.


And then there was Johnny. John Brinnand. Oh my God. He was, to me, gorgeous. He was the lead singer with a ground breaking band, the Great Bear. Ground breaking because along with Dilip Balakrishnan they wrote much of the music themselves - not just covers. Although to see him perform Brown Sugar was pure joy! They actually had a concert of simply their work, 'Seagull Empire' at one of Calcutta's largest theatres, Kala Mandir, and they pretty much sold it out. I shadow danced behind them - I was such a wannabe groupie. I adored John. Loved the rest of the band, they were friends, Dilip, Nondon Bagchi and Devdun Sen but John I loved.


The sad thing is that as I grew older we grew closer, more like friends and were, almost, lovers. My mother wondered why the bedroom door was locked! I'll say no more - use your imagination but suffice to say there was a certain shortage of clothes to be found. And that was that, he never came back and I left. I think I found him today, I hope so and I hope that we can still be friends. Suspect however, that I will get moonstruck all over again even if he is fat and balding.


The only truly romantic thing I ever did was for John. I was going to Puri and asked of he would like me to bring anything back. He said the sea.

So, I went to the bazaar and bought a brass pot, I had engraved, "For John, the sea" and then I walked down to the water and filled the pot with sand and shells and seawater. He did quite like that.


Finally there was Anguish. Angus Scott. At King Alfred's College a group of us went to Wisconsin on a one semester exchange.

The very first meeting we had in walked this very good looking young man in cricket whites. Such a cliche, and I initially thought he was arrogant and a pain.


When we got to UWEC it was a different story and for four months I think I made his life very difficult. He was younger than me and didn't get the devotion bit at all. Although, I did have to help with his washing! I think I scared him but we became such good friends. Had such adventures - I went camping in Voyageurs National Park with him and my darling friend Jon. 

Real camping, tent, fire, wet ground and a chemical toilet. Not me at all.But did I complain, not on your nellie. I wouldn't have dared.


Odd thing - and you my solitary reader can let me if you think it is too - I phoned him just after I got home, he left a couple of days after me, and he said that he had been walking up to the shops listening to "Who's Gonna Drive You Home" and it had made him think of me and he felt sad. I'd had never listened to it so took little notice. When I did hear it hmmmmm mind games maybe?


We stayed friends of course, I directed a production of 'The Dresser' with Angus as Sir and darling Oliver Darley as Norman. Bittersweet time - hours spent in rehearsal.

 Why does it still matter - because it does, it really, really does.


He's a reporter now - with Sky and then ITV. Occasionally he pops up with news report or the football results or, best of all, he fronted a Grand Prix one year for ITV. I still want to be ablonde and pull the cool guy. Never gonna happen.


There you go - my loves and obsessions. Am I a bunny boiler or just rather sad? Up to you...
xxx


Oh yes - and if you want know what it was really like back then click this link .

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1041002/asp/calcutta/story_3825885.asp