0009 Mild And Bitter Thoughts

and I'm sitting in the pub, fruitful source of people-watching verse, (Jake will know it) collecting the strength to walking-stick home or that's the story, chilling out, glass half empty, heart half full, a benign haze of love for all the people in the pub mingling with an universal love suspectly opposite, two sepia photographs of local scenes, which the thoughtful pub chain use to decorate the walls: both are of the local, semi-rural, Tube station; one's from 1905ish so I'd I guess from the floor-length skirts, the birds'-nest hats; I wonder if the ladies felt the need to think dress up? dress down? for this ground-breaking, literally, new form of transport? the other's from around the early 1920s: a glimpse of stockinged ankle, gasp, or manly faint.. I try to place myself, push my sepia way into gelled history - 1905, and if I still lived round here the house would be brand-new; I -we- would be so proud; newly-married with my stable job, stiff collar rubbing on the neck in summer heat; and just the right age to fight for King And Country in that bitter war that loomed on the expansive, leisurely, secure Edwardian horizon..how did my widow manage with all those children? No; I know too much in my born blood of that trench war.. let's look instead at post-war peace - the stiff collar still chafes, but I walk erect still in a bowler hat, a waistcoat, a sense of my place in society, a career of slow but steady rise in just one firm; and it's a toss-up whether I might be still young enough to be called up for my King And Country around 1939, or old enough to be bombed at home... The glass is empty and the crisps are done (that sounds like Auden, Eliot, Betjeman?) : I pull myself with sepia suction sound out of the photos into full colour; and still benign and walking steady, take home my fantasies and gratitude. One lifetime at a time - that's quite enough.