rolhirst.co.uk

It was Rod Serling that did it. Teri bought me those old Twilight Zones on DVD for Christmas, and I can’t… I find them almost too painful to watch. Because the first time I saw them, I was someone else entirely.

I was eighteen, living away from home for the first time. I’d recently discovered Socialism through Billy Bragg, and thought maybe the world was changeable after all. When I graduated, I was going to work for Greenpeace or CND (I wasn’t even sure if CND had any jobs going, but they must have paid somebody to make all those stickers, even if it was only a pittance). I was going to live in Calcutta or farm with peasants in the Himalayas. I was going to love many women and tap poetry from poverty and expose political hypocrisy, maybe grow my hair into dreads and live on a barge.

We’d sit around and talk it all out, all our plans – me and Ronnie and Timbuk, in that mangy little ground floor flat we rented on the Aberdeen Road. Smoking what we’d got and watching old Twilight Zone repeats late at night, or listening to Peel and wondering why everybody didn’t play these songs, all the time. We were about to take a journey, and I swear we saw the signposts up ahead…

And then, so many years later, this angry, bitter man with cobwebs spreading through what’s left of his quiff slips a DVD into his Blu-Ray, turns on the Plasma Screen TV that cost him the equivalent of two years’ rent on Aberdeen Road, and waits for Rod Serling to take him back. Back to a time before Teri and the kids, before even She-Who-Won’t-Be-Named and the weekend children. To a time before he was paying the mortgage on two separate homes, supporting two separate families, drinking far more than he ought, and coughing up guttery tar from cigarettes he can’t seem to quit even though nowhere will let him smoke them any more. To a time when everything was possibility, when his only worry was getting an essay in on time or whether he’d have enough left at the end of the week to get Jeana Fowlis drunk and in the mood for amour.

If only Rod Serling could take me back. That’s what I’m thinking now, late at night again, after Teri and the kids are in bed – though not even late-at-nights are the way they used to be. I never used to have to notch out my belt to sit comfortably in the armchair or rub cream into my legs to stop them itching or worry that this glass of Glenfiddich really ought to be my last. Ha - Glenfiddich! I’d have spat this bourgeois shit back in the face of anyone who dared serve it me. I’d have…

Sight and sound. Shadow and substance. Things and ideas.

Imagination.

Read the complete story here.