It’s more than two years since I’ve written and posted anything here. Two years.

As is very slowly becoming tradition for me on this site, I begin apologetically for my extended absence. I’ve been meaning to ‘get back to it’, with all good intentions, and record the thoughts I have had on being a Dad and observations of how my son is growing. But the demands of parenting and domestic duties have used up almost all time, and certainly most of my energy. In any case, being employed as a professional word butcher has carved off just about everything I would consider worthwhile or useful from the big wet fleshy slab of my creativity.

There has been plenty of note to set down and say, I am sure. I’m quite saddened that chunks of it have gone for good, unrecorded. So here I am, today.

Am I now caught in the throes of what it truly feels like to get older (and then old)?

Days move fast, and faster. Last week dissolves into now and now melts into the month after next. Autumn leaves are kicked through the calendar straight into the following Summer, Christmas seems to come and go at least twice per year and I blow out the candles on next year’s birthday cake before the flour it is made from has even been milled. Before long it all becomes just one indefinable circus of experience rushing by at an increasingly interstellar speed. Everything happening all at once.

I turn around to look at that thing I did or that time we had – and it was both yesterday and two years ago. I sometimes feel like I am mid conversation with someone and discover it is three years since we last spoke. I try describing that amazing thing from five or six years ago, and I can only really recall a glimpse, an impression, an echo. Don’t get me started on things from decades back. They are just a blur. A flash of colour or a scent or a fragment of sound.

Time: Running wild, as David Bowie once said.

Following on from my previous post here (which mentioned a Genesis concert on the reunion / farewell tour of 2021) the band’s original singer Peter Gabriel has recently released his tenth solo studio album since leaving in 1975. This, therefore, seems an opportune, neat and thematic moment to try the ignition and see if the engine still works on my pen.

i/o, this new Peter Gabriel album, finds him on secure but reflective existential form. As ever, there are broad and long social and political ideas – turning the tables of mass surveillance on the powers that be, the court of social media, radicalisation and suicide bombing etc. But the record is mostly concerned with the personal at the most fundamental level. Put simply, it’s about life and death. The input and the output – i/o. The album is, therefore, morbid but it is not moribund or even particularly mournful.

It’s all, as my wife describes it, very very mature.

Gabriel was in his early 50s when he began work on it, and is now approaching his mid-70s. He’s well aware of death’s presence as it half climbs in through the window and gets a leg into his room (lurking over there just behind the final curtain). But he’s not wallowing in its creeping backwards shadow and is seemingly confident in turning towards it and facing it down. He appears to be completely unafraid. This braveness comes from his perspective that the end is not really the end, just as the beginning was not really the beginning.

Sort of “I know you’re coming for me, but in fact I win”.

The title song deals with the interconnectedness of all things, in other words how life is one great big thing moving freely and constantly for as long as time exists. Being a human being is merely one short expression of that life – a briefly explosive pimple on the surface, say. A certain moment of chance, a gathering of atoms at a certain point in time and for a certain amount of time. All is all else, from before and from after. Nothing ever dies, just changes.

Time, time, time.

There are several songs specifically about this, but two are key.

Playing For Time, the one which lends this post a title, has a sort of comforting Randy Newman lilt through most of the verse melody and, like Newman, the words are poignant and meaningful but never quite maudlin as they are set warmly within that lilt. It’s a personal lyric about the importance of memory, and how the memories we have made can sustain us as we get older and then old. Sorting them out, letting some go, keeping tight the ones that are important – “everything I care about held in here, all of those I love inside”…

Playing For Time also asks “whether we are prisoners of time or whether that is something that can actually free us” (and those are Gabriel’s own descriptive words about the song). It weighs this up beautifully, as does So Much. These two songs are bedfellows.

So Much is a sober and sobering darkness which seems apocalyptically regretful when brooding on “raking through the empty shells of all the rockets that we’ve fired” (I believe that line to mean either the desolation of non-achievement, or the carnage of interpersonal battle). But, once the penny drops that the wasteland music is a little bit of a Trojan horse, that notion of sorrow completely falls away.

It is about urgency and the true beauty of meaning is revealed. There is opportunity all around you all of the time. There is “so much unfinished business”, “so much left to do” and you have to force yourself to find it and face it and fall headfirst into it if you can.

In other words: Time is ridiculously limited in this human form, so make the most of it. Everything is up for grabs – and, in the end, any regret implied by the song is simply that there’s “only so much can be done” during this one body. Time is always running out for the flesh, and there is literally so much stuff that you really can’t do it all anyway.

I have come to terms with the shock of becoming a parent in my later years, and the effort required. In occasionally reflective mode as I now put time into a sort of holding pattern so that I may set about nurturing another, I also realise that I believe myself to have made the most of my own modest life.

This does not come from a place of self-justification, but I really do believe in self determination. Making the most of your human life means whatever you want it to mean.

For some people ‘making the most of it’ will mean ensuring they have as many nights down at the pub amongst the warmth of friends as they can. For others it will mean travelling the planet and seeing something new and amazing absolutely every day. For some it will mean attending every Test Match played by England, for others it will mean playing in a Test Match for England. For some it will mean abseiling alone down the side of skyscrapers. For others it will mean staying home and tending their garden. For some it will mean sitting quietly in routine and reading books, accumulating knowledge. For others it will mean switching off from it. For some it will mean having children and raising them, and for others it will mean avoiding that.

For a billion other people it will mean a million other things that my small and tired brain just does not have the capacity to imagine.

I know that I have not achieved many of the things I would like to have achieved, that I have not done many of the things I would like to have done. I have not been with people I have wanted to, and I have been with people I have not wanted to. I have not seen some of the places I have longed to see, I have not taken opportunities, I have made poor decisions. I have not returned calls, I have made one too many. I have not spoken up when I should, and I have spoken out when I should not.

I have not done this and I have done that.

Tomato, tomato.

Yada yada. Blah blah.

Just as for anyone else, if you only observe one era it is not a truth by which you should judge an entire. When you look a little closer, past any possible headlines – in my case, at the work, the writing, the songs, the anything else of any creative note – you’ll see the bigger picture. For me that picture reveals that I constantly did what I could with what I had, and it has added up to plenty enough. More than most.

I don’t feel any obligation to embarrassment for not completely capitalising on My Talent as that idea is based on someone else’s measure. Nor for not being a rocket that fired off into the night leaving sparks and glowing inspiration arcing behind me.

The reason I am so confident in this self-assessment is that the times apparently wasting, unfulfilling and empty and lonely, actually did mean something. At least as much as they meant nothing. They were my experience in human form, and I learned bits and pieces from the lot. Some of my time was spent slow and quiet, and staring at the wall. Some of it was fast and gaudy and shouting at the sun. I don’t feel I wasted a second of it, not one of my (approaching) fifty-five years. Even the catastrophic or catatonic bits were as crucial, in the end, as the comfortable bits.

It all went somewhere into something I wrote or put out.

i/o.

But I don’t really care about any of that anymore. I don’t beat myself up or praise myself about the past since becoming a father. It doesn’t seem to matter. Just bits of it remain. As Playing For Time says: “everything I care about held in here, all of those I love inside”…

There is an occasional feeling I have which amazes me and releases me. Perhaps, if you were unkind, you could say that it gets me off the hook from taking responsibility.

It is that my human life, in and of itself, has just been something to get through to reach this curious mid-space of being my son’s father as well as my Dad’s son. I am big and I am small, everything and nothing, somewhere and nowhere. Somehow aware that the three of us are absolutely the same thing anyway, just different versions. Each of us a limited edition.

We are all – every one of us alive today – just the interconnected conduits through which the never-ending life accidentally flows, the temporary vessels in which it can move. I do hope that some of the things I created and some of those things I learned stick deep in the cells and are remembered in the atoms, and are carried on through and beyond we three.

Dad, dad and son. I’m happy with that. I know my place – it was there, and it’ll be there. But now it’s just here.

Does the awareness of knowing your body has what is in effect a death sentence (but with no specific date attached) act as an engine for speeding into human experience in the most vital way possible? Can you be released into vivid experience by the truth of this form’s mortality? I’m not sure, I suppose you can and I suppose you must. But what I can tell you for certain is that today I’m about to make my son’s tea, and settle down to play with his trains.