Time to wake up.

memories:

I have a lot of flashes...

squintish glimpses, echos bounce back like radar.

At an early age I was playing in the playground, Beecroft Lower School...it was snowing and we, like idiots were playing football on the concrete, skidding around, larking about. I remember my legs swishing out from underneath me...as I fell and struck the back of my skull crisply on the icy sheen of the playground. Still remembering the pink faces of the kids gathered around looking over me...all parkers, woolie hats, and gloves on strings.

"...are you alright, Paul?"

"So cold." I seem to recall saying...

Memories of a sickly feeling and the blackness looming in. Shutters coming down & then I am in Luton & Dunstable Hospital, under observation. Ice cream to make me feel better.

Apparently, Mum had run all the way to the school, at least a mile and a half, in her slippers through the ice & snowdrifts. She told me, years later, that my eyes went completely white as they rolled back into my skull. Touch & go...

Then I am watching U2 spy planes take of from Akrotiri Air base with my brother as we carelessly played on Ladies [s]Mile beach in Cyprus.

A few summers. 6 weeks holiday from school. To Cyprus to stay with Nan & Grandad. Standing in the Cock-pit, saying hello to the pilots. My own passport at 9.

One time we saw transporter planes take off and rise above the beach. Suddenly hundreds of parachutes opened, drifting, trailing and I imagine feet, splash landing in the sea, as the landing boats picked up the soldiers and brought them to the beach. The boats fronts collapsing down onto the beach and men running past.

I remember 'The Major'. A retired British upper class type. Badly paralysed down one side, who still managed to walk with an armbraced stick, drinking Gin with my Grandfather, an ex-pipefitter from Tottenham. His garden. His pride. His gentle smile.

Uncle Bob, another Major, who played the organ and prompted an embarrassed boy in short trousers to sing 'when you're smiling' to drunken strangers and even drunker relatives.

The hire-cars were all Ladas. red, yellow, blue, in lines.

I remember my father being questioned for hours in Larnaca Airport. They thought he was Carlos the Jackal.

Deep in the shadows there are snatches of me wandering in the Cypriot countryside, up the quarzt filled, stepped hills. Through the wandering sheep and slo-mo lizards. Lapping up the sun. Short Blonde hair. Teeth in braces. I turned a corner and was suprised to see a goat, hanging from a carab tree, it's legs bound to the branches... The bushes broke and there was George, the local farmer, smiling with knife in hand.

As quick as I remember it now, he swiftly slit this animal down from it's throat to it's belly. As he did so, the pale grey balloons of sinews and guts spilled out onto the dusty ground before me. They started to steam. George turned and smiled and then calmly walked back to his farm.

I can't remember what I did next.

on I went...

At home in England, back at school. Dread. A ring of 5 or 6 children, all taunting me, bronzed from the Cypriot sun, alone in the middle.

"Two black eyes & a jelly nose...doo dah, doo dah!"

"Paul is a Paki...doo dah, doo dah!"

on I went...chasing the singers of the song, round and round...

When I was 14, I had another glimpse. We were playing indoor Hockey, and someones stick made a convincing connection to my cranium. I felt OK at first. Later in the French lesson, Mr Cadigan asked us all to settle down, take our seats, and start writing the date across the top of the single sheet of white paper awaiting everyone on the desks. Only... I felt unable to write a single thing. I tried to write and I couldn't remember how to. As everyone else started scribbling away, I became frustrated, and then confused. The words on the pupils paper right next to me were Alien too. I looked up, incapacitated, and noticed the clock. On it's face were a series of unfamiliar symbols. I couldn't seem to discern between French & English. Even the places where I knew English were supposed to be were in 'Alien' too. It was all utterly meaningless, as I scanned the room and the strange markings apparent everywhere...and that sickly feeling I had experienced years before in my previous school, returned to haunt me, slowly rising into my stomach and then to my head.

Later in the Art class with Mr Firmstone, I would suddenly arise from my seat and try to attack my best friend Stuart Monk, for absolutely no reason.

We laughed about it later, thankfully.

on we went...

So I was born,

I got taught,

I grew up,

at least I presume that's what it was. Our Identity is the mark inside. It is ever changing.

It is not a card, a passport or a fashion statement. It is not confined to geography or religon.

It is not confined.

The opening statement of this site declares that I am lying somewhere in a vanity coma. Awaiting an awakening...

This is only part of the story.

We as Humans experience our worlds, through sensory perception as tiny electrical signals to our brains inter-dependantly of each other. But express ourselves dependantly.

We need each other.

I do not know, for sure, what the color red looks like to you...

And you do not know , for sure, what the color red looks like to me...

We live in our own dimension called 'my self', and share common experience.

We are not puppets.

We are not the strings

We are A Quantum of possibility.

Crassly, I'll recall the words from 'Stairway to Heaven' by Led Zeppelin;
"Yes there are two paths you can go by but in the long run,
There's still time to change the road you're on "

But, are we presented with a road system dictated by the design of others? A plan made by 'qualified' architects, enforcing a reality known as normality?

If there is a fork, a choice is presented, which has the intent to fool us into believing it is ours.

Are we not the roadbuilders?...continually laying down a track for ourselves, out into the future?