Nineteen and I’d just past my test
So drove us all to John O’Groats,
My passengers now both old men.
Both of them still friends.
With youthful recklessness I damn
Near killed us nineteen times before
Our Sunday lunch in John O’Groats
Then I drove us South.
We stopped to pee in Sutherland
In a passing place. Clouds cleared.
First time I’d seen the Milky Way;
Pissed over my shoes.
Then drove off through the bristling night.
Unknowingly, we aquaplaned
Fort William’s yellow, spiky streets,
An hour’s drive from here.
By 26 I’d wisely said
“I think I love you.” You: “Oh good!”
And with your friends you’d come back here
Now with me in tow.
We sat in bed, gazed down the glen
On your birthday and sailed to Skye
While night skies never quite broke free
From the May gloaming.
At 28, we’re married now:
A mad fortnight of drunken nights,
Canasta and hilarity
While lusty stags belled.
At 31, we’re parents now.
Fred’s 2nd birthday sees me bid
£10 to buy the show’s prize cake,
Making locals gasp.
Aged 38 we’re here again
Before a damp cottage on Mull,
And their first flight. Diana died
Later on that night.
41, this time my in-laws
Invite themselves, don’t do a stroke.
We picnic on the Green Isle, Loch
Shiel’s burial ground
Before your erstwhile step-father
Drove us all mad half-planning his
Birthday barby on Kentra’s sands
In a howling gale.
At 50, with some fractious friends,
Long walks and late night whiskies and
At last we tour the Big House and
Find the dog’s gone blind.
And dinner in Acharacle
With Michael Brambell in whose arms
Guy the Gorilla died. We spoke
Of foul-mouthed parrots.
And now I’m here at 61,
And Fred’s turned 32 today
With us, wrapped up in Martha’s love.
Little else has changed.
Nino Stewart walks her dogs as
Buzzards shriek above the tops, lochs
Specked with isles with gangly trees
From a Durer print.
In truth the greatest changes came
Between when I was almost here,
My shoes still damp from my own piss,
And that trip with you:
At 19, on the cusp of hope,
Set fair for Cambridge, as they’d planned,
One life ahead of me on tracks
Leading God knows where.
Then, whatever hope I’d had, that
Cambridge wasn’t all I’d guessed, a
Timeless playpen of unchanging
Old complacency
Rotted away to fuel that rage
That blew me, laughing, off the rails,
Spin in the air, then land wheels down
On the open road.
That Post-War world of me, 19,
Was slashed & burnt. Yet thieves still rule;
The land round here’s still lorded over
By their landed kin.
The change is coming, like a curse
That festers through the centuries,
To pay us back in fearful kind
For all our old crimes
The mists will boil, the bracken bleach,
The red deer drown as glens fill up,
The Highland archipelago
Just beyond clear sight.
But until then, hope fills my heart
With deeper draughts than at 19.
We’ve all to play for, you & me,
Still in our run up.
As the leaves are turning russet,
Cloudbursts pulsing down the hills
We measure out our lives in cats
And trips to Kinlochmoidart.