Cool day, today. They still come along, now and then. Spent, mainly, over a loooong lunch, shooting the shit with ‘Rock’s Most Famous Writer’. Or Mick Wall as he’s sometimes known.
Both outsiders, both Celts. Him, full of Irish craic. Me, pure dreich Jock. Whatever the accents might not say. Two Princes in exile. Raising the standard Drambuie.
The outsider thing, though. Interesting. I figure we all belong, inside, somewhere. We just need to find that place. Maybe Mick got a few clues today. A fragment of a map that points to…well, that place you were always meant to be. Hey, there’s no such thing as coincidence, right?
We talked about the writing thing. Unsurprisingly. Some guys have been there and got the t-shirt and worn it to death on the journey back. If they make it back at all, of course.
Mick, though, well, he’s the guy that made the T-shirt, ran it up on some fucked-up, raggedy-arsed machine and wore it waaaaay before it became the prized collectors’ item to which us mere pretenders aspire to wear.
The stories were great, too, and Mick’s got a couple of life time’s worth to share. And share he did, God bless his blackened, burned-out paddy heart.
But we both have our quotient of great levellers. Mine are older than his, not less trouble, you understand, just older.
Kids, eh? Twelve or twenty one they’ll always be your kids and, if I may invert the great Philip Larkin, “They fuck you up…”
Like I said; cool day.