Love you ‘till the end

The song.

Turn inward and imagine something better. It started when I was sixteen listening to, say, the Pogues. I'm on a stage at my high school with a band of friends, performing before a crowd of a hundred versions of my parents nodding and smiling, perhaps even holding hands. I imagine that all the time, different tunes.  

I hope you have your little ships to a better world like I have mine. Like closing your eyes and touching a chord on a piano when you're sure you're alone. Or singing, just singing. You need those escapes to face the battering we all get hurled at us.

Sometimes I'd imagine it's my wedding and I'm playing a tune, usually the Pogues' Love you 'till the end. And as a result, I imagine someone would love me for a long, smiling time.

My dad did that at his wedding, while my cousin was handing out whiskeys from a tray and my uncle Hugh was handsomely dancing with his wife Kathleen, and I was leaning on a table, and there were friends from very long ago talking about the big back then, my dad held his guitar in his hands and began Eric Bogle's Lady from Bendigo. His voice tremored, people stopped moving, stopped talking, circled around him, some held hands, his wife Monique listened with a hand to her face, ready for tears.

In September, I'm getting married. To someone who hugs my young imagination like an old friend and goes for a walk with my soul. I think of Scottish poet WS Graham, who was very poor and often cold in the early morning, strolling along the Greenock bay, which is a grey/blue place in Inverclyde surrounded by majestic little far-off islands. He wrote: Listen. Put on morning. Waken into falling light. A man's imagining may suddenly inherit the hand-clapping centuries of his one minute on earth.

Or another Scottish poet, William Letford, who wanted to tell a young guitarist outside Greggs that this is it. I’d like tae tell um thit this is it, this is where the hammer hits the stane an sparks ur made, standin oan a corner in yur hame toon, an audience eh one radge eatin a macaroni pie, bit singin, wee man, yur singin.

And I imagine the cheerful words of my grandfather, who when he met my future wife, simply said that she was very, very beautiful, with the only words he could find, and gave a thumbs up, and started to sing. I think I'll sing today too.