The Still, Small Voice: Part Two - This time it's personal

There's something quite disconcerting about waking up from a dream at 1.25 in the morning to find Jesus hanging on a cross just above your head. But that's what happened to me in the early hours of Saturday. I was in Room 16 of Alnmouth Friary, a bit hungover from two bottles of cider, I'd been in bed since 10 pm and I didn't want to set my alarm for the following morning's breakfast, so as not to violate the silence that's supposed to exist between 9 pm and 9 am. Probably this is why my body clock decided to wake me up around 7 hours early for breakfast, just to be sure.

Annie Lennox's Tartan Suit - It's the stuff of nightmares

A lot of Christian traditions seem to prefer to depict an empty cross, to emphasise the fact that Jesus is risen, and not on the cross anymore, but at Alnmouth they have gone in for images of him still being on the cross in a big way. I got up to go to the toilet just after I woke, and there was almost a lifesize Jesus on the cross just outside my room. And there's another one in the garden. In fact, they're everywhere. The dream I'd been having was pretty weird, and some of the resulting thoughts which arose from it made me feel sad and bit teary. I guess if anyone can relate to suffering, it's Jesus..

In the dream I was at work and just finishing my shift and someone I'd been chatting to online but who I'd never met turned up at the office looking for me. I was about to ask her loads of questions about what she was doing there, but all she said was 'It's okay, there's nothing that needs saying'. Okay I'll get my coat I said, but that was the point when I woke up...

When I woke I still had my earphones in, and the song that was on was 'The Lovers are Losing' by Keane. To paraphrase the lyrics of the song, it's all about 'having a dream about having nothing at all, and looking at your past and your future from a distance, and taking the fragments of your dreams, which you don't like the way they've been going, and rearranging them with hopefulness into something new'. I was maybe reading too much into this...

Somehow from that I started thinking about my dead dog Hudson and the merits of cloning technology. I reflected that, although I've got his ashes in a box next to my bed, I don't want to have him cloned. The reason for this is all to do with nature and nurture. The dog I loved was terrified of fireworks, and he hating hearing angry voices, and sometimes he'd get a bit insecure around big male dogs and try to pin them down by the head, which could sometimes result in some awkward moments with other dog owners I met whose dogs were pinned to the grass by Hudson's fully extended jaws...

But that was the dog I loved. Despite his faults. And if I could take some of his ash and swill it round in a test tube until I got a little black puppy, I wouldn't want to. Like in the Boys from Brazil he wouldn't be Hitler, he would just look like him.

I suppose the logical extension of this thought was that I don't want to be cloned either. The last 45 years or so have made me who I am, and that continuous narrative that spills out of me every time I write or start speaking wasn't written into my DNA, and can't be reanimated from a box of ash. How would I even explain the 70s to a newborn me, living in 2014? He'd think I was making it all up.

The night before in the pub we'd spent a lot of time talking about the movie Robocop (mostly the 1987 version of course). By the end of the film, despite nearly having his body blown to bits and almost having his humanity overwritten by computer software, he still knows that the same Alex Murphy is in there somewhere, and he hasn't become a machine. Despite life's admittedly massive setbacks, he's still got his narrative intact...

I slept for a bit after that, but then I woke up again at 5 (Jesus was still there) and again at 7 , and as I'd not brought any books with me I read the Bible for a bit, mostly the old favourites (James and Ecclesiastes). Just before going down for breakfast I read the verse from James 4:14

Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

It was at this point (8.05 am) that I went down and sat through the silent breakfast. At first I found the silence oppressive but then I started to settle into it, and I didn't want to be the one to break it, when it finished at 8.45. Unfortunately, I spent a lot of the silence with a song in my head (All in vain, by the Vaccines), and the verse about being a transient vapour from James going round and round, and that made me even more aware of my narrative, and I kept thinking:

I don't want to be a mist that disappears when the sun comes out, I don't want to have lived my life in vain, I want it to count for something, I want to be the heroic star of my own show, who'll be remembered for ever...something like that.

At one point one of the brothers interrupted the silence to ask us if we were going to be in for lunch, but in the style of Keanu Reeves in the Matrix with his sewn up mouth, we couldn't answer him. Was this a trick, to see if we were following the rules?

Perhaps the effect of being squashed down like a spring during some of the night's thoughts about my own impermanence and by the silence at breakfast can explain what followed:

Stephen, Adam, Mark and I set off on our 10 mile walk to Amble, Warkworth and back and I suddenly turned into an airborne story telling projectile. Each and every subject that came up during the walk I greeted with the phrase 'Ah, I have a story about that'. To be fair, the other 3 had plenty of stories to share too, but stories were bursting out of me like popcorn out of the top of an uncovered popcorn maker on a high heat...

Subjects covered included Little and Large, lemon curd, the difference between rivers and seas, Blue Peter, Annie Lennox's Tartan suit and House of Pain...the list goes on.

Despite the fact that this was a walk and not a cycle tour, I decided to carry an oversize bag of spare things (in this case shoes in case the new boots I was wearing started rubbing), similar to how I always carry a bag of anvils and dark matter on our cycle tours, even when we've got a support vehicle. This also reminded me of our Royal Wedding Ride (I'll post a link later).

After about 4 miles, we almost got to Amble, but there was a river in the way, so we turned back to Warkworth and had a meal at the Hermitage Inn, which Adam researched on Tripadvisor before we went in. We were nearly put off by the age of the clientelle, as there was a man in a mobility scooter doing a 57 point turn outside, but inside there were some young people too.

Further strange rumblings from 1986 and 1987 came in the form of a playlist in the bar that included 'The Power of Love' by Jennifer Rush (she's half German, I saw her interviewed in German on German TV when I lived there in 1987) and 'Never gonna give you up' by Rick Astley, which came on about half an hour after I said 'The way this playlist is going, the only thing we need now is 'Never Gonna Give you up' by Rick Astley.

Also, there was a telly on near the bar scrolling through some photos, and at one point it settled on someone wearing Annie Lennox's tartan suit (there can't be more than one). This was getting more and more like the Matrix or The Truman Show...

The meal was excellent. I had some sort of salty brisket roast dinner followed by Spotted Dick (in honour of Dick the Vic with the massive shoes from the Royal Wedding Ride). Then the 4 mile walk back. My feet were feeling bruised by now, but the boots were still comfortable.

On the way to Amble we'd walked almost the whole way along the beach, and then on the way back from Warkworth we walked back along the cycle / footpath for National Cycle Network Route 1. Both routes were roughly parallel separated only by sand dunes, and each one reminded me of something from the past, two episodes almost exactly 10 years apart.

On 20^th July 1995 I walked along that beach with my first wife Beverley. She was a teacher, it was the first weekend of the 6 week holidays. After spending 70 nights in hospital in the months preceding that, and having had 3 major operations, there was a point she thought she'd never see anything else ever again, except the inside of hospitals. I think the emotion she felt on that walk along the beach that day, the ordinary wonder of being alive, had been sharpened by the months of fear and pain preceding it. This wonder can be lost in the noise of life, but feeling almost as if she was back from the dead, I can understand why she called it her 'perfect day'...

Having said that, it wasn't perfect for me. It was red hot, I'd forgotten to pack shorts, and as we wandered in and out of the sea, I removed my wet bottomed jeans and walked along feeling quite embarrassed in just my pants for a while. On reflection, for her, my embarrassment might have just added to the perfection, or maybe it made no difference at all...

Ten years later, 18^th July 2005, on the other side of the dunes, I cycled my first cycle tour with Ruth. That day we'd cycled from Whitley Bay, heading for Alnmouth, via Amble and Warkworth. It was by coincidence the first weekend of the six week holidays, and also our 6^th wedding anniversary. We ended that day in Alnmouth with a massive sleep inducing meal (at Beaches) and a walk along the beach before passing out at 8.40 pm. The next day didn't continue quite in the same style as we awoke to find a cat disembowelling a dead bird on the carpet next to the bed, but you can't have everything.

It may not have been apparent to my companions on Saturday, during the unleashing of my unlimited reserves of stories and anecdotes on the 10 miles we covered, but I was nevertheless on some level paying my respects to two previous versions of myself on the walk, the 27 year old version of myself who'd been there before in 1995 and the 37 year old version from 2005.

It's a bit cheesy, but something in the day reminded me of that cathedral book shop staple bookmark fodder quote about 'Footprints'. About alternating between one and two sets of footprints on the beach. It was another reason why I don't want to be remade in a test tube from a chunk of my own DNA. Because as well as all the thousand stories I did share on Saturday, there were other personal stories I didn't share. I didn't just carry an unnecessary pair of shoes all day. I also carried those two remembrances from earlier in my life. I wouldn't swap the memories of either day for being rebuilt from scratch.

A really nice part of the day was that I didn't have to remember them alone this time. Instead of being aware of my own pair of solitary footprints in the sand, next to where my previous ones had been, there were four pairs on Saturday, making a brand new memory from scratch, to add to the previous two. And it's another one I wouldn't swap for anything...

I did reflect afterwards on whether there was any meaning in my dream of the night before, or in fact no meaning at all. A day I spent moving between extremes of silence and an attempt on the world speed talking record made me wonder about the person in my dream, who said there was nothing at all that needed saying. Was that person God, or an actual person in my life, either past, present or future, who already understands me so fully, there's no need to explain anything?

On Saturday night, after my speed-talking-a-thon, I got chatting to an Australian called Dave, and he said as well as listening to the words I was saying, he was listening to the silence in between them, to the pauses. I was quite relieved to hear that there were some!

As I said to the glazed over faces of my friends in the car on the way back on Sunday, Ecclesiastes talks about there being a time for everything under the sun, but how do you tell when it is? How do you decide what to say, and what not to? And more importantly, how do you decide when? I read the whole of Ecclesiastes on Sunday, and it doesn't tell you when to do certain things, just that there's a time for them...

The last thing I read before I left on Sunday was this: From Ecclesiastes 6:12

For who knows what is good for a man in life, during the few and meaningless days he passes through like a shadow? Who can tell him what will happen under the sun after he is gone?

I guess everything I say and have ever said, whether in person, or by blog post, or in the olden days by letter, has been an attempt to explain myself, to put myself across in a way that conveys more than just the basic DNA of me that could be collected from a cheek swab. My very essence...

And that's important to me, because I don't want to be just a mist that vanishes...or a shadow that is passing through. I want there to be something in my story (and endless stream of anecdotes) which is lasting and indestructible, and which will continue long after I'm gone. 

 Is that too much to hope for?