Home Thoughts From Abroad ………………

 I guess it’s an age thing, but more than ever a picture, a song or just a set of words bring back a torrent of memories.

Lake Mergozza, 2018

And at 71 you end up having to be careful, and resist the temptation to wallow in a warm, cosy bout of nostalgia …….. more so because nostalgia is never really all it’s cracked up to be.

The sun didn’t always shine, I didn’t always get the girl at the end of the night and over half a century later, the hair styles and clothes I adopted look at best a little eccentric and worse just downright silly.

But of such things are memories made.

1971

And in particular the two songs which appeared on the same single by Clifford T Ward in the June of 1973. 

Home Thoughts from Abroad* and Gaye** remain elegant and gentle songs and instantly take me back to that moment when I passed into being grown up.

I had graduated the year before, got married, and was just completing a course to become a teacher.  

Added to which I had got a job, my mother had recently died, and I was just six months or so away from buying  our first house.

All of which makes for a shift in your life.

At that time, I was unaware of Robert’s Browning’s poem Home Thoughts From Abroad, and rereading t today I can’t say it is one my favourites.

But Browning who wrote it in 1845, had been in Italy for a long time, and I guess must have felt the pull of home, and after equally long stays in the same country I too have been drawn back to Manchester where I have lived for the last 52 years, and south east London, where I was born and grew up.

2018

All the more odd that both of us were born in that part of London, he in Camberwell and me in Lambeth, and that my early years were spent in Peckham, which is as close as you can get to his birth place.

But away with such self indulgence.  By the time Mr. Ward’s song had become part of our record collection, I had cut my hair, readopted ties and almost sensible shoes and left that familiar home.

Location; South East London, Manchester, and Italy

Pictures,  Mergozzo, 2018, me in 1971, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Clifford T Ward .... Home Thoughts from Abroad, https://vimeo.com/92886879

**Clifford T Ward, Gaye, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6NEVh8pHP8

***Robert’s Browning’s poem Home Thoughts From Abroad https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43758/home-thoughts-from-abroad