Through The Looking glass Oct. 3, 2009

And just like that, you Jane get in touch. Your web-page displays a successful childrens illustrator with more than 30 books to her name. Not the name of your youth. You have married!

I sit here at the very table I showed you and pal Sam on a slide-projector the very photos you refer to (as well as others) (it was a summer’s day – it was 1987); i am in what was and is and will always be the house of my youth. Where my mother is still. Siblings not so far away. Berkhamsted and Tring.

And it’s my Mum’s birthday (today).

I have put away my being-Stuart-Clarke/Lake-District-artist intensity for a weekend, to try and do some simple things well with my Mum, around her birthday. By the way I’ve been to see Mott The Hoople at the Hammersmith Apollo last night with me bruvver – THE band of my youth, reformed in original line-up format on this October night 37 years on from when they last played. 5 lads from a west country border town. There was always a connection with them – I collected Mott The Hoople from aged 11 when glam rock Bolan and Bowie were about…but Mott were mine. I bought the pink and white (like coconut ice) “Mott” album 12 incher from PRP record-shop and marched it home preciously (checking in the bag it was still in there, undamaged, mine) – Mott and me over the blue bridge and under and through the tunnel. And through that invisible LOOKING-glass wall that led you and led me from there.

Mott-in-hand my life changed forever as the needle accustomed to Andy Williams Mooooon River bounced and scratched along on My Mum’s old record-player positioned on the back dining-room floor out of the way, at the feet of where i am sitting now.

I was borne in this house in so many ways.

Today I walk past your old door, in Dudswell.

Ever ready to reconnect, not only with old Berko area but with why I began the football odyssey in the first place, i am revisiting over time the grass roots of the football game that so obsesses me. This can be in Hyde Park (you had a job/flat near there last time i pursued your memory and got the lowdown not from you but your Dad, more a cricket man) and these grass roots can be at Dudswell old rec, Butts Meadow, Velvet Lawn. Jane can you bring these memory places to life in a series of bright naive-art postcards (love that picture of yours “in the town where i was borne”) – i will pay for their production.

I walk on near the Grand Union Canal, past Berko Town’s ground and Graham Aiton is sat out the front and being me I recognise him but he calls me Kev (my bruvvers name). (Always fancied his tall gorgeous Scottish-looking sister Heather but it would not have worked).

I look for football near the Castle grounds, near Sam’s olden house, at Cooper’s grounds which was Kitchener’s Fields where everyone tobogganed. My grandfather whom I never knew was chief accountant for Cooper’s pharmaceuticals and agricultural supplies and built/opened many things in the town such as the town swimming-pool (the Deer-Leap also), the town’s football grounds, the Rex cinema (recently reborne). I search for and find his grave slumped up against a wall that looks as if its about to come down in that cemetery on Three Close Lane, above the Rex, almost in Ashlyns Estate – dangerous territory. (Indeed if I see Ashlyns bully Mick Duggan today, although my not being a man of violence, I shall pin him up against that dangerously leaning wall. He will have doubtless withered. And I have not).

The phone vibrates. It’s a text image of my daughter. Only offspring. And boy does she look sprung – punching the air Travolta-style about to party somewhere up there near Cleethorpes, she is dressed in red shoes, leggings and the black bolero I bought her. Another vibration and with it another image : she dancing and clutching a trumpet with a group of girls (The Band) in what looks like a Cuban balmy evening. My Ava is 4 next month.

Today I am sat on the old Woolworths spot now Waterstones and Costa Coffee, on Berkhamsted High Street, buying arty books for Ava (she is arty) (and sporty) and she phones my Mum and sings her “Happy Birthday” through several verses, quite beautifully.

We surrounded by books… which you yourself might have designed.