Still Boho After All These Years...

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Passing through the living room on my way upstairs to the bathroom and back this evening I caught a phrase emanating from a ten-year-old episode of Location, Location, Location: '...the bohemian area of King's Heath [Birmingham, UK]...'. They were viewing a flat in one of those glorious three-storey Victorian terraces that infest the area and which are firmly lodged in my memory and very much a feature of my youth. As I think I've mentioned before in these pages, there were two particular houses there that were multi-occupancy centres of just that King's Heath bohemia. To this day, over fifty years ago, we still count one of the residents of this hive of outré living as a very long-standing friend.

Again, I've mentioned before about the 'Gerlan Bohemia' that accreted about us when we moved to Gerlan, Bethesda, and hooked up again with John, who had by then gravitated to North Wales to study archaeology at Bangor. We were visiting an old schoolfriend of mine - another John - and after a couple of repeat visits I conspired to find a way to get a place at the then University College of North Wales - again mentioned in these annals - to study [postgrad linguistics as it turned out].

Anyhow, the point of this ramble yet again centres around time and one's perception of 'time'. I count myself fortunate in having led what I characterise as being several 'lives', having been lucky enough to find myself able - usually by gently-guided happenstance - to move from one sphere of existence to another. I count the initial move here to North Wales [Gogledd Cymru] to roughly be my fifth such 'life', and I've lived several more between then until now; each with its own separate essence and cast of characters, many of whom have been external constants throughout my internal changes. Inside, mentally, each of those 'lives' is as a chapter in a book, but at the turn of each, my internal sense of 'time' resets and I start afresh. So it was when I retired from my last 'life': the world of work as a telecoms engineer.

As each chapter turns, however, my physical self ages inexorably, despite the repeated internal resets: that much, in this world is inevitable. What I will say, however, that those mental resets to face each new 'life' I lead bring continued freshness to my existence. Arrival is not a thing for me, as there is no goal nor place to arrive at. Even though - particularly in our post-Brexit, post-Covid, Trumpian world - my physical range of exploration has shrunk somewhat, internally my world is constantly expanding, encompassing many more trains of thought each day. This is what keeps me - and this daily scribble - going. Who knows what's next?

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