It Will Pass Like All Good Dreams

Okay I admit it. I don't come from Harrow I come from 1975. I was 16 and it feels like everything I am now is wrapped up in that year. The year I left school. The year I went out to work. The year I stopped dreaming and got out of bed and felt the cold hard pavement beneath my feet. The year..... . Okay I admit it. I've just finished watching the last episode of The Rotters' Club, a three part drama set in Birmingham, 1975-77. Three boys at a grammar School, struggling with family, music, girls and politics, you know. Against a constant sound track of The Top of the Pops their little lives are played out. And somehow despite the differences between their privileged, middle class lives and my own lower middle class, I traced my own history in a London, suburban boys Secondary Modern School, built during the second world war. They pulled it down eventually, but long after I left. And my concerns were the same - on a different scale of course, but the music, the appalling hair cuts, flared trousers, brown, yellow spirals, the Bernie Inn and the diminishing echoes of a lost psychedelic dream that had become over ripe and rotten to the core. Did it ever exist? I remember sitting in a squat, bare floorboards, dope being passed round in a pipe and Pink Floyd's A Saucerful of Secrets playing somewhere too close. No I think. But that is besides the point. The point is I'm surrounded every working day of my life by 16 year olds and I see in them as well, something of myself. No that is not the point either, the real point is nostalgia, the programme was a sentimental journey. That's all and as I'm alone, and its 1.25 am and have no one to talk to but you, I'm afraid you get it. Never mind it will pass like all good dreams. And it is watching the grains of sand slipping through my hands, half empty now, wondering what have I become - my little life.