I wrote this book in a strange format. As I drove to work every morning on the frosty, winter days, All nature put on a display. The sun would rise with rich oranges and purples. One day a fabulous fox loped along alongside my car. Trees glistened festooned with glowing frosty crystals. It caused the heart to glow. Every day I would pass cars upside down in the deep ditch alongside the windy road.
I imagined someone badly injured, dying slowly as they bled out, waiting for help. Hence the writing is in short spurts of consciousness.
Reflections from a ditch
Love is sweeter than friction.
I am the product of sheer incredibility. Each moment of the whole existence of the universe has built towards the culmination of this moment. It has conspired.
I am upside down and afraid- no – terrified.
The routine has become extraordinary as it was always bound to, and indeed, as it always was.
Perhaps it started in my childhood. Everything was concrete and real then, going on quite the way it should. I had a happy childhood being a little rugged demon, dirty and cheerful, with grubby face, dirty knees and scabs and bruises. My fingernails were black and bitten ragged. My tufty hair dangled over my forehead into my brown eyes. Ten seconds after getting clean clothes on they were torn, crumpled and coated in tree bark, leaf sap, snot and grime.
There is a wonderful photograph of me taken by a neighbour whose son, Jeff, was always immaculate. I had got in my cub’s gear and walked the 200 yards down the road to call for him. We both stand to attention as only boys can do. He with his most serious expression, neat creases and gleaming face, me smudged with dirt, crumpled, crooked and askew; one sock around my ankle and grinning from ear to ear. That summed up my childhood for me: loved and crumpled; free and filthy; running wild through the quiet streets and fields.
In the streets we played cricket, football and tennis. We groped in ditches for sticklebacks and frogs. We played cowboys and Indians, gangsters and war, safe within little gangs. I lived in a pretend world. We hunted birds’ eggs and bats, built dens and raced carts. We built forts and tree houses. The sun burnt us into brown fiends that the dirt never showed on. We kept wild mice, snakes, lizards and slow-worms. The days were long endless bouts of sunshine viewed from the tops of tall trees, from the undergrowth of meadows and the bottom of ditches and ponds. It seemed I lived my life from the bottom of a ditch. Which was more real – the mud and slime of the frogs world or the bright light filtering through the trees?
The world outside was reflected in the surface of the stream and even as a young boy I spent my life peering through the shimmering ripples of the reality out there towards some deeper, murkier world below.
I guess we all live in a ditch with no real view over distance. We don’t even know we are so restricted because so many other peoples’ ditches are really open sewers.
Reflections from a ditch eBook : Goodwin, Opher: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store