On a sultry night in New York, just over forty years ago, two unassuming Jewish boys from Queens District stepped onto a stage, looked out at half a million people, and said:
‘And here’s to you, Mrs Robinson’
You can see the body language for yourself on Youtube: the sideways glances, the unanswered smiles and the awkward missing of cues that tells you all is not well. Watch The Boxer, and you will see for yourself what happens when a relationship goes just that little bit too far adrift.
For me, these two men represent the highest point of the culture of my lifetime, that concert in Central Park the one place on earth that I wish I had been at, sitting on the autumnal grass. I don’t expect anyone else to necessarily agree, as art is like that, but Simon and Garfunkel were, and still are, what I always reach for when it all goes sour, and when it doesn’t. Shove me on Desert Island Discs and Bridge Over Troubled Water will be the last song standing, when all the others have been washed away.
Seventy-five minutes and nineteen songs later, they closed the set with ‘Sounds of Silence’ and went their separate ways. I’m not sure that they are on speaking terms even now.
Six years earlier, Paul Simon had written about the claustrophobia of small-town life in My Little Town, a feeling I understood all too well on the edges of Petworth. He describes that pent up, testosterone-laden feeling of needing to get away as ‘twitching like the finger on the trigger of a gun’. ‘In my little town’, he said ‘I never meant nothing, I was just my father’s son’. Bingo.
I remember that feeling so well. By the time I was not yet eighteen, I was off, first to Switzerland and then to the army and the dreams of glory that any soldier with sense starts his career off with.
But then, two decades later, I came back. Helped make a home and raise a family. Did all the things you do to be able to call somewhere home: smile at the neighbours, create a garden, know who to call when the pipes freeze. My own sons’ fingers twitched on similar triggers, and now they have gone, too. Caroline and I realise, as my parents must have, that this is as natural a process as the greening of the oak leaves each spring.
And last Friday, I stood in front of about 130 people in St Mary’s Church and did my minuscule, pathetic Central Park concert for them. Instead of condors, it was shearwaters; instead of skyscrapers, it was cliffs. And during the 45 minute interview, I squinted through the bright stage lights to just about make out friends and family who had turned up to support, and I realised somewhere so deep inside of me that it took till two in the morning to excavate the thought, what it felt like to belong. The town at which I had rolled my eyes on a thousand occasions was being kind to me, and not rolling its own eyes back. Not visibly, at least.
On the wall of my office is a large map with the next adventure marked on it in twelve, evenly-spaced red dots. It has taken me months, years even, to realise that that journey is only possible for someone like me from the security of a known base, albeit one that drove me up the wall for a great chunk of my life.
You know, my little town.
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