Naked Lurch

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Wondering what to write about today, I considered the conversation I had with Joe earlier about "junk DNA" and my ramblings on folk memory: everything else about our corporeal selves is preserved generation to generation, why not memory? Just a thought. I also thought I might take Jane's suggestion of posting about my latest eBay coups: fifty quid job lot of stuff, the principal bits I wanted and worth maybe five or six hundred quid, along with a load of assorted things that might be of use and one little thing that I don't need that will pay for the whole lot at least twice, maybe three times over.

But no: glancing over the living-room bookshelves I spotted my old copy of 'A William Burroughs Reader', which I bought in 1983. It reminded me of the time I played five-a-side indoor football with a boisterous crowd of teenagers in Caernarfon Youth Centre - I was twenty-nine at the time - as part of my rôle as activities worker and unemployment counsellor for the Unemployed Workers' Advice Centre in Bangor.

I was there to hold a clinic on benefit issues - believe me, in the early eighties there were serious issues, as there are now with the benefits system - but none of the young lads were really interested in anything but showing up the 'old bloke' in their midst. The game was frenetic, rough and brief: after I'd slotted a goal in from the midst of what can only be described as a scrum, they relented: I was OK after all. Oh - the William Burroughs Reader: I'd taken it along in case I was just going to be sat around waiting for something to happen.

You have to roll with life. I've had so many 'careers' and changes of scenario - mostly self-inflicted, though not exclusively - in my sixty-six-and-a-chunk years: learning to adapt to whatever one's newest environment is, sometimes on a few minute's notice, really keeps one sparky. Retirement is just the start of a new sequence in this ongoing process: there is no stop until I stop being; the only grass growing under my feet is the stuff in the garden, which we cut this afternoon. Keeping it fast and bulbous here in the mountains; Hwyl fawr i chi gyd!

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