Who Knows Where The Time Goes.

I collect useless facts, inconsequential snippets of information. Books, magazines and TV were full of these facts; my Dad was full of them and he would spout information rather like an ornamental fountain sitting at the sitting room’s apex.

Sometimes I would get them from school friends and teachers; from the barber in idle conversation with another boy’s mother. The barber shop was of the old fashion sort and the barber (like lots of adults I knew) from the same parish. I remember he was quite robust and full of life at that moment in time. He was discussing a TV series called Manhunt, so that makes the year 1969 (thank you wikipedia). It was a wartime drama, about an airman on the run in Nazi occupied France.

He was discussing a specific scene, where a Gestapo man is inspecting a line of prisoners. In the line up there is a naked woman, and his eyes are shown to linger over her body; and in particular her pubic mound. My young mind may have augmented the scene, adding in some nakedness when it was not there.

Forty One years later, and the scene still occupies a portion of memory, already overloaded with useless facts. Rather like in Citizen Kane where an old Banker recalls a girl on the Staten Island Ferry, who he had glimpsed briefly as a young man; and never forgotten.

But I don’t think the memory comes from the TV show. Rather it’s because of the conversation in the barbershop. I remember the barber saying “You’d think he’d never seen a naked woman before.” The woman laughed, one of those saucy sea-side postcard laughs. In an instant I saw the barber and the woman as sexual beings, not just adults. I could see them having sex, and appreciating nakedness.

I stopped going to mass as a teenager, and switched to having my hair cut by a hairdresser. I moved away to Manchester, and visited home during the holidays. Over Christmas 1979 I worked as a waiter in a Men only Social Club. It was quite usual (up north) to have women excluded from Social Club bars, or the club itself. I served a lot of men who are now ghosts, alive only in memory. But back in ’79, they were animated and alive; drinking too much and leaving me massive tips.

Most of the customers I recognised from the parish. They had remained unchanged for many years, solid square shouldered men, who always wore a suit and tie. And they knew me, because my Uncle was on the clubs committee, and it was he who got me the job. My incompetence (serving a pint of Scotch beer, when the customer had ordered Scotch Whisky) was overlooked, and I spent an unusual festive period watching square shouldered men get drunk.

On Christmas Eve a thin shrivelled man, dressed in an overcoat too large for his small frame, approached me at the bar. He said “You don’t recognise me, don’t you” . And I lied and said my memory was bad. He introduced himself with the barber’s name, and I had to put aside that 1969 memory to see it was the same man.

The frail old man bought me a drink, then shuffled off to his seat. I remember asking my mother what was wrong with the man, but she had no explanation except he was getting older. The nudge-nudge wink-wink barber was now reduced to a sexless husk, the spark had left his body and he had joined the walking dead. That’s how I saw him on Christmas Eve 1979. But I expect he was still the robust man from 1969 inside.

It’s my birthday today, I’ve turned Fifty. Apparently the weather is the same as the day I was born. And essentially I’m still the same, unchanged by time. I’m not cynical, bitter or unduly nostalgic. And I still feel like going out, raging into the night. And I do miss those people I once knew, who have shuffled from this mortal coil. And in the scheme of things I’m just a microscopic dot on the landscape. But I still can’t help wondering: where did all that time go.