Fourteen years old, running through a field of crops as high as my waist and almost as fast as the puberty that was at that time in my life surging through my entire body at warp speed, everything with breasts or a shapely backside seems viable right up to the moment of the face slap. when your internal dialogue states quite clearly ” you could have handled that a little better”

It’s a Saturday and the sun is pouring from the sky in waves that warm your skin and makes you squint your eyes as it touches your face and has a taste and smell to it that makes the freedom of being on summer break even more of a poignant reminder that, you have six weeks to make the most of the summer before returning to school.

The drudgery of autumn; Walking to school in the unpredictable weather, everything was grey, boring and mind-numbingly repetitive to a youngster in a town of half social housing and the other half consisting of an ever-growing number of buildings belonging to a massive pharmaceutical conglomerate, a small town of shops and a market square on the top of the hill with a dowdy museum in town located adjacent to the (central park) as if having this title gave it some kind of a sycophantic link to new York’s very own city-central park, trust me, this town is nothing like new York. It is not even on the same continent.

I am on my way to meet my mates, messrs Taylor, guard, Wellborook, Philcox and Richards. And I remember the tune going through my head at the time and it was Barry Manilows, looks like we made it.  As it was the last tune I had heard on my mother’s radio that was forever stood on the worktop right next to the copper cold-water pipe that ran up the wall towards the top of the house and was always polished with duraglit, a product of thick wadding infused with no doubt a cacophony of chemicals now banned because of their probable links to major diseases. However dangerous that stuff was or maybe still is, it made that pipe shine like nothing you’ve seen in your life, as a direct result of all the puffing and panting of my mother as she polished it with a cigarette adorning the first two fingers of her left hand held out at an angle as she stood back to admire the fruits of her labours with a thick yellow duster in her right hand with its red blanket-stitched edge’s.

I strangely remember this product so well as whenever I hear the “tang” of a tin lid on a hard surface it reminds me of the sound of the tin being opened by my mother and the lid hitting the surface of the countertop and slowly rolled around before finally coming to a stop, I remember wishing it to land, rim-edge-down like an upturned bowl,  but it was always counter to my wishes as if it knew what I wanted and was deliberately sticking its fingers up at me in its chemical act of defiance.

It was a good three quarters of a mile from the edge of the cinder-track to the tall trees where “base camp was” this was flat ground but one of us had no doubt hear the term “base camp” and decided to adopt it as our camps name (boys)! It was a track of literal cinders that were expelled from the local PowerStation that stood on the opposite bank of the creek that was at the foot of the tall trees and was a source of heated water in the creek all year round that made winter skinny-dipping a real hoot.

 

I arrived at the tall trees and had realised from some way back that I was alone and none of the others had arrived yet. We had no communication other than to arrange times and places the evening before and just turn up as planned, life wasn’t so complicated back then.

I climbed a good fifteen feet up the first tree that was closest to the field I had just come through, going across this field was the fastest way to get to the trees but also the most  dangerous as it meant jumping across several well dug and deep drainage dykes that traversed the landscape as far as the eye could see, and with crops at the edge of the dykes being a good four feet high they were obscured from sight and sound alike, so if you’d ever have fallen into one of these dykes you wouldn’t have been found unless you could make your way long to an overhanging tree or a shallower bank and manage to climb out. The nearest bridge to go over one of these dykes was a half mile away at the site of wells’ fireworks factory gates down on the marshes.

I saw nobody from my vantage point, absolutely nobody at all. I waited a good half hour for heads to show above the crops as they came across the field but nobody came. It was a half hour of staring into the distance as well as “without realising it” enjoying the silence and solitude of the moment.

Being fourteen I would have been pushing the boundaries of behaviour by swearing a great deal while out with buddies, so I guess I would have mumbled a good few swearwords at them in their absence and because of their absence and climbed down from the tree to base camp to decide what I would do next. As it was the weekend I would have received my pocket money, which in turn means I would have got ten (number 6) cigarettes, swan vesta matches as well as sweets and fizzy drink for a day at camp.

I would have got a container of water from the creek before opening the cigarettes as we were always mindful of the dangers of fire and being so close to hundreds of acres of dry crops. (wasn’t till we were all 16 that we started to deliberately set fire to those crops) anyhow! Peeved with the fact that I was on my own I sat on the top of the riverbank which was a man-made bund and had a puff, a drink and munched on sugar-laden chocolate whilst deciding what to do.

I know I somehow came to the decision to walk around the riverbank to the roman road called marsh street that would take me back to the area I lived in. it was a fair old walk from where I was at the time but it would at least kill a few fours and I could nature trail it as I went. The riverbank meandered down to the estuary where it flowed into the river Thames via a floodgate made of concrete and steel and to see such an angular precisely squared-off building in amongst the flowing lines of the river delta and marshland was, even at that time was a scar on the face of nature, although it is my understanding that someone was accredited with a design award for it.

I am not entirely sure how long I had walked for or at what speed but remember coming to the area fondly known as the shit-chute at the very bottom end of marsh street.

As younger kids, we would climb up onto the chute which was an open-ended pipe outflow from the water treatment works just inland from the chute and next to the protected empty and derelict building of the old smallpox hospital that had once stood in the grounds of the local hospital.

Instead of turning inland and heading home I decided to carry on walking along the riverbank towards the exhaust funnels of the road tunnel that left Kent and ended up in Essex (if you were already in Kent) and vice-versa for the essexites. I went as far as I could before the land turned into industry and sat on the riverbank in the sun watching the sun dance across the water that was rippled and wavy because of the strong currents experienced at this point in the river.

I don’t rightly remember my thought processes or how I came to reflect upon life, well, my life and its new apparent complexities of females, bikes, sports and school, but I did and I got to thinking about the number of people going through that darned tunnel. On a purely minute by minute basis there were thousands, hundreds of thousands of them all heading through a tunnel to go somewhere. If there are that many people going through a tunnel, then how many are coming back? how many don’t come back?

So how many people in town, in the county, in the country, on earth, my god my mind was about to implode at the realisation that there are gazillions of people on earth, with more arriving day by day. And what do they all do where are they all going, why are they all going there? what happens when the new ones arrive? Well the older one’s die don’t they! Then the big one, so what’s the point of all that? what is the point?

I remember having been told many years before that when your family members die they come back as great animals of the planet and I took this in my mind to be that one of the greatest living things on this planet are whale, and perhaps therefore they sing to us?

I sat and watched the water for what seemed like an eternity but clearly wasn’t but, it was getting late and the sun was going down and making some of the most beautiful reflections on the water, I figured in my mind that every twinkle of light reflected upon the water was another life coming and going in an almost one in-one out kind of way to balance out the number of people alive on earth. Not too overcrowded and not too low as to invoke the worry of not enough people to carry on. The amount of twinkling going on seemed to sum it up for me as the water was twinkling every bit as fast as the people rushing through that tunnel. The lights seemed to be inviting, asking to be looked at in case you recognised one of the twinkles as a friend or neighbour.

Then the question that I think hits all free-thinking people at some point is.

Yup, so what’s it all for? what’s the reasoning behind all of this.

What is the meaning of life itself? Well it’s not 42!

And it is not all about being reincarnated until you achieve nirvana. Don’t believe in reincarnation-didn’t believe in it last time I was on earth either!

Put aside all the preconceptions about heaven and hell, the good the bad, oh and the ugly. Saints and sinners, Dog and the devil and of course darkness and light.

My very own and never shared ideas of life, the universe and leaky biker gloves is.

We are all water creatures, whether you like to swim or not, even if you’ve never been to a bathing pool or beach in your entire life, however long or short that may have been we are all creatures of water. Look at us, we are made of the stuff, we need to stuff to survive, to be clean, to see, to eat, to grow food, to cook foods, our eyes depend on fluid, our hearts pump blood that is water with a few other chemicals to sustain life.

We are put on this planet to purify the water that is on here. No other reason. I don’t know why or for what reason, but it’s all we do from the moment we are born to the moment we pass on, we intake use, purify and pass water in vast quantities.

It’s the only job that every single one of us must do without exception, the one unifying common thread that nobody puts a value on.  But for the average lifespan an awful amount of water must be consumed and passed. It’s been going on for millions of years, why even the dinosaurs needed vast quantities of water. You could argue and win in a debate as to whether the water you drank shortly before or during or after you read this was at one point part of the blood to make up the blood of a tyrannosaurus. Or a French head of state or a baker in a small town in cape town. It’s all been used before, millions of times and will be again, but it needs to be purified. Its passed through us, goes to the sea, salted and cleaned, evaporates up, comes back down and is drunk again and again and again. It’s the only real purpose humans have that’s a natural condition and response. To be thirsty and to drink.

The views expressed here are my own and I’ve not copied or read this anywhere else it is a view I have held for over 40 years as my interpretation of

THE MEANING OF LIFE

 

Fandango x