One hundred and twenty-seven pounds sterling. One hundred and twenty-seven pounds to renew my aged passport. Not counting the expense of the car park and the cost of the postage to send my old passport to Corby.
Corby. A name from the past. The outré sister town of the so much more prim Kettering. I remember during my first year of full time teaching in the Boys School in Kettering that I much preferred going to Corby than going in to town in Kettering - though, of course, Kettering was the place with the Waitrose and not, emphatically not, Corby.
There was a more immediate vitality about Corby, and then there was always the shock of hearing the Scottish accent as the predominant one in that town in the centre of England. I was told that a steel works had shut in Scotland and the work force flocked to Corby to take jobs in the steelworks there and the accent had persisted. I was also told, to take taxis and ignore the busses there as "Corby was rough".
I never found it so myself and often scoffed at people in Kettering who wondered at my bravery in chancing my arm in such a place. So, as my old passport was stamped and slotted into the system in Castelldefels to get it to Corby and get a new one sent to me, I supposed that the Passport Office situated there was a government initiative to try and find some work for the folk who having moved from Scotland to find work in an open steelworks after their own had closed, had to think about upping sticks again after the Corby works closed.
It brings back a whole slice of my early working life, whose memories are now more of a melange of impressions rather than distinct narratives of day to day existence.
I can no longer find my way about the haunts that marked my home in Saint Botolph's House in Barton Seagrave and my way to school and into town. Not unreasonable you could say as my memories are half a century old and based on my being there for little over a year before I moved back to Cardiff and promotion, in a city that would see me to the end of my teaching career.
The passport is being renewed because I am going back to Cardiff for a pre-birthday Birthday Party, and in digging out my passport (not used for years) discovering that it expires in August of 2025.
My passport is a burgundy one, with the European Union stamped across the top of it, a passport that gave access to a bewildering number of countries until the narrow-minded cretins of Brexit ensured that our insular geographical situation was mirrored in our political and social states.
My new passport (one hundred and twenty-seven pounds worth of it) will be a British Beggared one, and my saving grace is that I moved to Spain before the idiocy of Brexit limited possibilities and therefore I have permanent residence and a card to show for it. It means that when I come back into the country I show my residence card first so that my passport is not stamped, and therefore does not start the countdown of the time that I am allowed to spend in Spain.
The longer I spend time away from the country of my birth, the less Britain remains a living reality in my mind, and the more it appears as a sort of stage setting for past memories.
I don't really know the price of anything. I understand that the price of 20 fags is now astronomical, though it is still not enough to repay the lost revenue from early death that the cancer of smoking steals. I don't know how much a pint is, or how much a loaf of bread is. I am used to Catalan prices and I am prepared to be shocked by how much the staples now cost.
But this visit is about Time, and my seventy-fifth birthday, and more importantly about seeing friends, ex-colleagues and family whose lives have gone on without my day to day involvement!
There are some people where no matter how long the time has been since last seen, to meet up is to be back where the relationship has always been. This is something that is especially relevant considering the death of my old friend of more than sixty years, Richard.
In writing about him for his funeral service I went back to the essential triviality of shared experience, the nothing occasions that mean everything - the slight and the transient that stay with you for ever.
The death of friends of such long standing, are not tragic, they are unthinkable, in so far as it is so difficult to imagine a constant presence (in spite of geographical distance) not being there. It takes time to realise the loss, with memory fighting to fill the gaps to kid you that nothing has really changed.
One part of my mind does, obviously, register the loss, and that will give an added urgency to the meet-up in early October (the passport office and the good folk of Corby allowing) in seeing people who have not remained the same age as I last remember seeing them, but, like me have lived the years through.
I remember talking with my Uncle Eric (a teacher who was retired and drawing a pension for longer than he had been in teaching!) once telling me that he had watched his entire generation, one by one, die off until, as he said, "I think that there is only one boy I was with in Junior School left, and I'm not sure that he is still with us."
This was a man who was evacuated after Dunkirk, in a much less well-known chaotic rescue mission from Cherbourg, and whose stories about the farcical, quasi-Surrealistic experience of fighting in an all-out war had to be heard to be believed.
Unlike my father and my grandfather, I have not had to fight in any war. Indeed I was a decade too late to have the horror of Conscription forced on me, and I was able to toddle my way from school to university lubricated by free milk and free tuition.
Although I seem to have digressed, it isn't really a diversion from the main theme of memory and responsibility: the memory of what was and the responsibility to articulate a response to who you are now.
And if that sounds a little pretentious and high-fauluting, then I should also say that the return to Cardiff is also the opportunity to have a decent Indian Meal and to drink a real pint of authentic Bitter, preferably a pint of Brains SA!
