Self portrait from Good Friday 2012

and one for the 14th Mar 2012

not happy with this one either and the addition of colour means the lips are too red

  FOR HOWARD

I am minded to take a little trip down memory lane. As I know he pops by and actually reads what I blurble on about, this is dedicated to Howard Smith. How do I know he pops by? Why he told me so!

I bumped into Howard in my local Sainsburys over Easter and he is a sterling fellow, loyal, friendly, a true yeoman, the sort of man you could trust with pretty much anything. He married his childhood sweetheart Mandy, though I was saddened to learn they are divorced now but they were as youngsters the ideal couple, both good looking and both as  nice as it’s possible to be and I wasn’t surprised to learn he was on his way round to see her when we bumped into each other. We were childhood school friends, he was the year below me at school here in Oxfordshire and we had many a happy summer dawdling about the village where he lived. Islip is just North of Kidlington which itself is some 5 miles north of Oxford.

 

There were three pals from that village who came to be schooled in Kidlington; Howard, or Brian as he was introduced to me and still to this day people will call him Brian but he chose his other first name and earnestly asked us to call him Howard from then on, which most of us managed tho’ it still plagues him, which made all his pals laugh (thought him, not so much!), close friend Trevor Timms and Kevin Gunston or the legendary “Gunner” (of course! ED). I was infatuated with Trevor’s breathtakingly beautiful sister and Gunner’s mum ran the local pub, the Red Lion

I have an indelible memory of rowing Howard’s little boat on the beautiful river of Islip, a tributary of the Cherwell itself a tributary of the Thames. Bucolic days of sunshine and oars dipping in the river and his energetic little Jack Russell ratting down every available nook and cranny of the riverbank. I reminded him of this and he even recalled how much that little rowboat had cost him all those years ago. £17! All that happiness for seventeen quid! Another friend, Leon, when informed I had bumped into our erstwhile pal, has memories of playing in Howard’s family shop and playing pea shooters as there an inevitable endless supply of dried peas on hand in the store room!

Aaah the peashooter! Never mind your Playstation 3 and your Wii, we had fun those days, sitting around the playing field learning how to roll cigarettes and playing peashooters in a cold store of the village shop.

Howard, sir, I salute you.