Sounds I Wish I could Hear Now

In the early drunken hours, on the patio of my new home while you slept, I smoked and listened quietly. Was that a toad rustling in the undergrowth? Or a frog? Or perhaps a fledgling bird?

I didn’t know for sure. But then the distant rumble of a train got me thinking of the past…

Lying in bed, waiting for the first bars of a favourite song in my earphones, perhaps Devo or Talking Heads, Tonic for the Troops, or Blondie to get me dreaming or take my mind off the murky nightmare of school tomorrow…

But before I could lower the needle of my Pioneer turntable I needed to hear the wheezy engine of my brother’s Suzuki on the top road, meaning he was coming home safely (because some of his biker friends never did).

Before that, the sound of a Class 35 fetching stuff from Wales, thundering from miles away, perhaps as far as Shrewsbury, louder by the second. And at last, when its thunder had faded distantly into the bowels of Cheshire and my brother had settled bumpily into his bed next-door, I could listen to a beautiful woman singing me to sleep.

But it wasn’t Debbie Harry. It was my mother, dancing into the mirror doing her Helen Shapiro, singing Walking Back to Happiness.