FRIENDS

View from Old Winchester Hill [Image: John Callaway. 2020]

One of the great things about the internet is banding together in groups to share interests and making new 'virtual' friends, people who one might not ordinarily have communicated with for one reason and another, people we may still yet not meet. One such for me is John Calloway fine photographer and fellow muso whose postings I follow and his webpage over at Wordpress page Ideas & Images from Portsmouth and Beyond is always worth a read and I regularly check out his photo projects from landscapes, foreign travels to peerless coverage of the bands he goes to see.

Now John knows how much I admire his photography and just the other day he posted some landscapes that caught my eye and admiration . . . . .then I read the text. It was about a friend who has gone missing

That people go missing has always haunted me especially for some reason, the sense of loss for family and friends and the human story behind every disappearance. As soon as I realised as a younger man that the figures for missing people are so enormous, it really frightened me. Their stories, the human background to the why's and wherefores, not only that but in this day and age how too is something like that possible? As a young man I hitchhiked mostly around my home county but also the length and breadth of the country from the south coast (Isle of Wight festival) to Wales and the Midlands and into Scotland's borders and it wasn't until one day that I was dropped in the wild stormy countryside miles from nowhere in the early hours' darkness by a lorry driver disappointed but not fussy to discover I was uncompliant and would not pay his 'fare', a male and not a female (my hair reached my waist at the this point) I realised how truly vulnerable I was. He dropped me by an unlit roundabout in the dark and pouring rain. Why he could have decided to come back and kill me and throw me into a hedgerow and no-one would have been any the wiser. I stopped hitchhiking at this point. I would have been in my mid twenties. and had been hitching for ten years or more. I still have incredibly vivid memories of towns and cities by night that I still do not know where they were, they exist in a kind of blend between dream and nightmare and meeting people settling down in bus stops, 'shooting galleries' near Selsey Bill, the Welsh landscape in a storm, Leicester by night and being stopped by the police to see if I was okay. Settling to sleep on the steps of an underpass near Piccadilly. The tap on the foot with a truncheon to inform me I couldn't sleep in the park, waking in a field on the edge of my home town a mere couple of miles from where I lived. All like a little unaware vulnerable pinball bouncing the countryside for no good reason other than that I could. Whistling the back roads of the Spring country side near Daventry with no money in my pocket. Luck is a thing . . . . . that some people go by choice is a given and the reasons people disappear are as numerous as there are people. Their stories trouble me. It is most likely why I ended my working life working with the homeless, each unique, each with their own tale to tell. Some fiercely private and protective of their histories. Some damaged and hurt, the victims of untold abuse (these are legion). My plea if I were to make one? Keep in touch. There are ALWAYS people out there who care and need to know you are doing alright.

The fact that someone is reported missing every 90 seconds in the UK haunts me. Some 186,000 people go missing every year, for some reason this terrifies me. Children are more likely to be reported missing than adults: 1 in 200 children goes missing each year; 1 in every 500 adults goes missing every year. John has posted some details about a walk he undertook with friends to highlight one such missing person's story. A friend. Illustrated as ever by his wonderful photography. Read more about it here . . . . . . . . . 

johnnyc1959 - walking for a purpose

If you think you’ve seen Matt

Call. Text. Anytime. Free. Confidential. 116000

Reference Number: 18-001470

Missing People, 

Missing People is the only charity in the UK which is dedicated to bringing missing children and adults back together with their families.Some missing people you will have heard of, but many more you won’t. For their families, life can feel like a desperate and unbearable struggle as they wait for days or even years.