Birthday No. 1 Blues #15 - The Sun Always Shines on TV

 

Everything is wet. The moment you step outside you experience the first instalment of drowning. Sleet, mist, snow, fog, drizzle. Take your pick. Always something watery in the weather. But mainly there is the rain, the insistent, persistent, consistent rattle of water on the hood of your coat, the flimsy window of your bedroom, the windscreen of the bus, the driving of it in the gale force wind towards your face as your sadistic new games teacher, an actual paedophile, gleefully watches as you and thirty other boys try and play something like a game of rugby in the middle of a mudlake. Later he will join you all in the showers scrubbing himself mad as though he’s not been under several layers of tracksuit the whole time.

The sun has become a memory, a rumour. You see very little of it in the first year you spend in Wales. Wellington boots stand ever present by the front door, stuffed with newspaper to soak up the latest intrusion of water. The roof leaks. Everywhere is damp. Sodden clothes dry around the various fireplaces of our cottage. You are rapidly becoming amphibious.

At first all of this feels like an adventure at times. Some people you know living on the mountain above the village are properly snowed in. You and your dad walk through endless drifts with supplies for them, bread, milk, teabags, toilet roll etc. You dry off there as best you can in the time that’s left before it gets too dark to walk home safely. Their roof doesn’t leak. Only when you get back do you ask yourself the question of why no one met you halfway to collect said groceries. This is a difference between the working class and the middle class. We think of others. We get wet.

School does not improve. The three classes – Welsh, English and Learning Difficulties kind of stick together at break time but with one crucial difference. The Welsh have largely adopted the educationally challenged to hang out. The English kids stick together but there is now a new third group. The ones nobody wants to associate with. The nerds, the uncool kids. This is the group I find myself in each breaktime. A less than magnificent seven who play football because the girls/cool kids wont talk to us and anywhere else we would probably get beaten up. I once score an outrageous bicycle kick forgetting that I am on concrete rather than at the Maracana and spend the rest of the day wishing I hadn’t.

Girls remain largely an abstract concept to me until the following Christmas when a single mum moves in with four kids bang opposite our house. The oldest kid is the only daughter and she is clearly not from round here. She is, by the standards of 1985 Ceredigion at least, exotic and interesting.

At this point, I am still in some kind of subconscious denial of all things sexual. The facial accident I suffered a few years ago introduced an unprecedented era of collisions, fractures, extractions and grim dental procedures. The result of which I now think, looking back, rendered me absolutely incapable of having any kind of romantic or lustful thoughts at all. As though someone in my brain, some Numskull said “Mate, you look like a train crash. No one will want this. Let’s just close that department down until things improve.”

But I know everybody else is going insane with this stuff. Even in mid 80s bogland.

The Girl Opposite becomes friends with me and my sister as she is almost equidistant between us in age. It’s exciting to have a friend who isn’t a social outcast like me. But it’s also frustrating in a way I was yet to fully understand. She is heavily into A-ha. She has those weird shoelace things round her wrists and strides confidently around the village in her leather jacket, flicking the Vs at anyone catcalling her and generally not giving a fuck. The total opposite of me. In what will become the first of a series of such women, she is able to make me feel about 200 % more attractive in their company and 500% less so at the same time. She tied some shoelaces around my wrist in some kind of well-intentioned bid to Harket me up. I removed them instantly. I knew who I was. And it wasn’t anyone cool.

Anyway, obviously nothing ever happens between us. I drunkenly ask her out many years later and am flatly turned down because well, I am flatly turndownable at this point.

Every time I hear an A-ha song though, I’m reminded of her and how backwards, how shy and alone I still felt. And how fucking wet it always was. The sun may well have always shone on TV. It was not shining on SY25 though. And if all that wasn’t bad enough we now had a different type of rain to concern us in mid Wales.

QUICK ASIDE ABOUT A-HA. A-ha are fucking brilliant. Seriously. There’s clearly some sort of underground Scandinavian school where they just teach The Mechanics of The Classic Pop Song and A-Ha, like Abba before them and countless Nordic types since, understand the equations between wintry melancholy and euphoric choruses in a way few others do.

Anyway, just as I thought I had at least rid myself of the terror of all things nuke-related, Chernobyl happened. The blast radiuses of halcyon days gone by had been replaced with precipitation maps that seemed to centre pretty much on yours truly. Acid rain sounded as bad as nuclear holocaust to me. No silver lining in these clouds. Just an oncological timebomb, that was all. Nothing there to ease the pressure of my ever-worrying mind….

Current Ranking of Birthday no. 1 – 2

Final Ranking of Birthday no. 1 –  N/A

What Should Have Been Number 1 instead that week – this.