...my friends and I

Back in bed for the afternoon, warm here, comfortable here, well looked after.. what is my problem…? Even look forward with equanimity to my seventy first birthday.. few of my friends have made it this far.. most of them are dead ..faded away. Barry still working seven days a week....Ron from Slough, highjack by his bankrupt son and grandchildren, they will never let him escape while he is sitting on a quarter of a million. A few others hang on ..John the coat.. hardly feel he will see fifty. A few more have made it so far as the Isle of Wight.. no further.…The "judge" bought a villa in Spain, but he in deep mire over that. Barry, beautifully set up in St Albans.. at the cost of his eyesight.. Another “long day man “ A longer one on Sundays. He had incredible operations on both eyes which are hardly the topics for discussion ..Told , as everyone, to stop smoking, as everyone, he has ignored this ..still 60 a day. A blind determination to achieve precisely what ?? at whatever cost. He lives mostly other people’s lives ..knows details of mine which I have long forgotten ..often asks “How old is Mark now ? ..”twenty eight.” .”Impossible !!” he always says. ….considering he used to bounce the boy on his knee in John’s café. Believe he has finaly seen the light after my gentle hints about his “retirement…!!” Decided he also will go precisely so far as the others.. along with his lifelong friend “Deaf Terry”. .and “Isle of Wight Bill” who quite suddenly, quite recently, dropped dead at the wheel …53.. finding that driving from Ryde to London ..add to that a twelve hour shift.. is hardly a sinecure.. suicide, rather more descriptive . Their problem .. they work without really seeing a end …where they are going …unable to see the wood for the trees.. The beginnings rarely know their ends.