A Somerset Lad

It feels like falling at the final hurdle.

Waking on Saturday morning, I felt as if I were suffering an allergic reaction, my eyes were stinging and my throat was irritated. I was convinced it was no more than an allergy because it had disappeared by the afternoon when I drove to Belfast to watch Ulster play.

However, yesterday afternoon, the feeling returned. “I must be developing a cold,” I thought.

Yesterday evening, a nagging cough began to annoy me. I took an antigen test, just another in the dozens and dozens I have taken in the past year. I was confident of a negative result. Almost immediately, both lines on the test strip turned red.

I have spent the day preparing lessons in a desultory way, the persistent cough creating a sensation of bruising in my right ribs. However, the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is as nothing compared with the severe asthma I once suffered.

I can hear Mr Light’s voice saying, “Deep breathing, Ian, deep breathing.” Mr Light was a teacher who taught us deep breathing exercises.

In the days at the Dartmoor special school to which I was sent, the available medications for respiratory illnesses were not as plentiful as now and they were administered sparingly.

Each morning we gathered on the tennis court, or in the gym, standing in lines as Mr Light called out the instructions for the inhalation and exhalation of air and the swinging of arms and flexing of the body. His philosophy was that the first response to everything should be deep breathing.

In addition to the daily exercises, Mr Light supervised the cross country runs over Hameldown on Dartmoor, watching boys in white tee shirts and blue shorts crossing the hillside from the comfort of his Datsun car. (One Saturday morning, a group of soldiers in combat fatigues passed us on the open moor; we thought that men who were allowed to run in full army kit had an easy time compared to us in light cotton tops and shorts).

Perhaps the clinical efficacy of deep breathing was not as great as he would have maintained, perhaps it would have been ineffective against severe respiratory problems, but perhaps its psychological power was significant. The worst reaction to a shortness of breath is a feeling of panic which only exacerbates the breathlessness. Instead, the slow, calm, steady deep breathing exercises created a sense of being in control, a sense that one had mastery of one’s body.

Stuck in a room in an apartment block all day, I should loved to have been out in the chill air of a Dartmoor winter.

Leaving the city centre restaurant and crossing the Liffey to walk through Temple Bar to catch the bus back to the flat, there seemed a great gulf between life now and the life of childhood years.

Perhaps Somerset was not a very sophisticated place, but restaurants seemed only to be found in hotels when I was young.There would have been the Langport Arms Hotel, and the Devonshire Arms Hotel in Long Sutton, and the White Hart in Somerton (an online search tells me that the White Hart has been taking paying guests since the 16th Century).

In my memory, at many hotels there would be a discreet notice advising potential customers that non-residents were welcome in the dining room, not that we would have been eating in a restaurant, and we certainly would not have been staying in a hotel.

There must have been times when, by force of circumstance, we ate out, but it is hard to recall there being more than a handful of places, none of which would have had table service.

There were a few occasions when we would have had a cup of tea and a biscuit in the cafe at the back of the Taunton branch of British Home Stores. On holiday, there might have been times when we ate at The Malibu Cafe in Westward Ho! On the annual village outing to the seaside town of Weymouth, sitting at a cafeteria table with crockery and cutlery we would have eaten our tea, fish and chips and peas, with bread and butter on side plates.

Absences from home were not frequent. Taking a picnic lunch or tea would generally have meant sandwiches packed into plastic lunchboxes. There would always have been cheese, sometimes with tomatoes, sometimes with Branston Pickle. (Fifty years later, my lunchbox is still cheese and pickle sandwiches, accompanied by three tomatoes).

If it was necessary to buy food when away from home, then it would generally have come from a fish and chip shop. Chips would be ordered with fish or with battered sausages. Set on a square of greaseproof paper, they would be wrapped in newspaper. Sometimes there would have been a preference for pasties, large oggies with meat and potato or with vegetable filling. The pasties had a distinctive and memorable peppery taste and were a filling meal for a child.

It would have been hard in such times to have imagined a life where eating out would have become a regular occurrence. Reflecting on moments long ago, there is a niggling sense of guilt at incurring unnecessary expenditures.

The two songs were introduced with the comment, “here’s two from 1979.”

Trying to recall the year concerned, I was not sure either of the recordings dated from that time of transition. Neither had the edginess of the closing days of the punk era. There was more the narcissism of the New Romantics than the nihilism of punk.

I’m in love with a German Film Star was never a favourite. However, the fact it was recognizable after more than forty years meant it must possess some memorable qualities.

The second song was the silky smooth Joe Le Taxi, by the enchanting Vanessa Paradis, who seemed to grow more beautiful as the years passed.

The mellifluous tones of the song conjured thoughts of Gallic laughter and Parisian charm and the sophistication of a young French woman who possessed that magical je ne sais quoi.

A Google search revealed Joe Le Taxi had been recorded in 1988, by which time the world of pop singers was a far remove from the life of a Church of Ireland curate.

Had it been 1979, Vanessa Paradis would have charmed a young sixth-form student. Except that even then there was a hard-headed realism that said such sophistication was far removed from a rustic, impecunious youth. The companionship of such a voice would be no more an attainable than would playing for the Chelsea football team he followed at the time.

The playing of the record was a reminder for someone who stood amongst the plain that there was a world that would forever be inaccessible, that boys on pushbikes with empty pockets passed unnoticed by the beautiful.

Perhaps the world of the plain is a safer place, it is a place where the predictable and the routine provide a daily order. Perhaps plainness is just an evolutionary fact of life, no more worth lamenting than realities such as ageing. Perhaps it is just part of an immutable natural order, something to be accepted without complaint.

Oddly, Vanessa Paradis’ voice evoked not the cosmopolitan life of Joe Le Taxi, but the hard reality of life described in Janis Ian’s At Seventeen:

I learned the truth at seventeen
That love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear skinned smiles
Who married young and then retired
The valentines I never knew
The Friday night charades of youth
Were spent on one more beautiful
At seventeen I learned the truth