“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
30 March 2025 ~ Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon
Once upon a time, whilst wandering lonely as a cloud (has anybody else done this?) along Bedford’s magnificent Victorian Embankment, I found myself recalling photographs of this elegant tree-lined vista as it had been in a previous existence, namely in Edwardian days and later in the 1920s.
The quality of gracefulness in the apparel and deportment of those people in whose ghostly footsteps I now presumed to tread romanced me by their disappearance. I felt as though I walked among them, that they were all around me but nowhere to be seen.
The vanishing act was like, or so it seemed to me, a carnival trick gone wrong, which nothing now it had been played could rectify. We are all of us in the Western world walking along such wistful vistas; sleep walking in the washed-out footprints of those who walked before us; shuffling robotically into Caligari’s cabinet, or should that be Count Kalergi’s cabinet?; hiding in the dark of it; preferring the suffocation of denial and inaction rather than exit through the back; knowing that all that is waiting for us is the end of civilisation.
Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon
In the meantime (whatever the meantime is), enveloped by the past and evasive of the future, I had walked as far as the monument to Britain’s dead of two world wars, and pausing there for a moment or two, or it could have been 80 years, Time is a terrible trickster, I smiled the smile that people smile when they have very little to smile about.
“I’m not afraid of you!” I said, addressing my own mortality.
Mortality smiled back at me, a knowing, sad and secret smile.
We shared the embrace of mutual sorrow, and I was on my way.
“It’s not the dying,” I explained, as I walked along the side of me, “it’s the ephemerality of what you were, what you are becoming but which you actually won’t become since by the time you have become it, you will in every conceivable way have become what you least expected and most certainly never wanted. It really is as fast as that.”
I stopped, hoping no doubt to suspend my animation, upon the Embankment Suspension Bridge (where better?) and gazed, for who knows how long, steadily into the water; the fast, the flowing, relentlessly fluid, the ceaslessly wet and willing water.
A young man of the present time was scorching down towards me, his arms a going at it like two strong steam ship pistons. He passed beneath the bridge, he and his canoe, and by the time I’d turned my head to look, he’d gone. I wondered if I’d gone too, for now I was quite alone.
The river’s rivulets rolled on. The riveted bridge resisted. But I was quite alone, apart from a little touch of rust, which would not, I reasoned, have been there once, when the bridge was built, but which seemed the more I focussed on it to be getting larger by the minute. The rust and I were in each others company.
I gazed along the river, this way and then that, but as for the boat and the young man in it, both had vanished into nothing and were nowhere but a memory.
As I alighted from the stone slab steps, some of which were crumbling ~ it would not have been crumbling when the bridge was built ~ the word ephemerality was bouncing around inside my bonce as if sprung by a pinball wizard. Had that been Roger Daltrey flashing by in that canoe, his hope to die before he grew old could well be the propulsion that has moved him on so fast; so fast we can barely equate the OAP he is today with the youthful figure whose ironic lyrics have been used in evidence against him for the better part of his life.
Overwhelmed by the stammer (and underwhelmed by Starmer) of Daltrey’s My Generation, I had to put myself down, purely in a manner of speaking, and nowhere could be better than on one of the many benches dotted around Bedford’s Mill Meadow.
There used to be a mill here once, a real working mill, until time, short-sighted foresight, the love of money and poor town planning (ask Richard Wildman, he will tell you) took everything it had except its name.
Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon
Sitting there in a mill-less state looking at the swans, painfully aware of the amorphous shapes hobbling by in the shadows of their predecessors, to which not even those who were spotlessly white could ever hold a candle, I thought of the many celebrities that age had been unkind to.
All things being as they are ephemeral, the great facilitator of fame and spectacle, I refer, of course, to the internet, is a double-edged sword to the public figure. TV personalities (devoid of such as they often are), Hollywood moguls, celebs, statesmen and the women who try to emulate them but never quite succeed and show themselves up in the process, have a back-stabbing friend in the internet.
In the temple to temptation, all it takes is two or three clicks to move visually and effortlessly through every successive degenerative stage of an individual’s life. The ‘before and after’ comparison can be truly quite disturbing, especially if, like Michael Jackson, attempts by plastic surgery to arrest the natural ageing process (and Buttox doesn’t help) have only succeeded in making it more grotesque. Disintegration and decay flash before your eyes. Yesterday’s sex bomb has gone off bang, and all that remains is a smouldering ruin. Whatever else the internet may be, and we know it for what it is, a fulsome, fatuous, flatterer, it is the last gallery here on earth to which you would want to entrust your ego.
Look at me, I thought, sitting here on this riverside bench, here in Mill Meadow, Bedford, the very embodiment of morbidity. Pull yourself together man! But Roger Daltrey’s balls were too insistent. They were swinging low like chariots, and though I really should have gone home, which is where they should have carried me, retreated from the Edwardian parasols and boaters of the 1920s, they carried the ‘E’ word with them, and I, like the buffers on a pinball table, could not avoid them striking me time and time again. The bells rang, the lights flashed, the scoreboard registered ‘Lucky 13’, the name of the game ‘Ephemerality’ turned gold and then lurid black, and ‘the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us’.
But now I was growing tired of it, or afraid of what it was leading me to. Like bananas from Lidl’s and Aldi’s, nothing stays fresh for long. I’d dearly like to shop at Sainsbury’s or be seen in town with a Waitrose bag, but who at my ephemeral age would be willing to give me a mortgage?
The soliloquy between myself was nearing a crucial stage. I was revelling in impermanence, whilst taking from my carrier bag a going-brown banana. It was then that temporality took me by the hand, not the one with the banana in it, and led me off chariot fashion to that Victorian villa across the river, yes, that one over there, for a privileged peep in a young lady’s boudoir.
Said the chariot in dulcet tones, which I recognised immediately as those of the Standard Quartette, “Take that gorgeous young woman …” (Who wouldn’t, without a second thought, were it not for those horrible tats and piercings.) “Take that young woman, for example. Here before the mirror she stands believing that she holds the present tightly in her pretty manicured hand, when all she has is a glove that slips easily from her fingers. These are the minutes and their minion seconds, which, in the dazzle of self-adoration, fall cleverly from her grasp. She is so impressed with the here and now that she cannot see beyond her current reflection, which, if she looked a little more honestly, she could recognise as changing with each diminishing beat of her ageing heart.
It starts with that straight, that perfect chin, which even as we look is turning into a double act, and then travels down to those full, firm breasts, soon to resemble John Wayne’s saddle bags, and next the midriff on display. It’s all of it destined to go south, from the tip of her powdered nose to her proudly pedicured toes.
“Avalanche!” I cried.
“Bugger!” someone else responded.
“And take this young man,” (I’d rather not, said I.) (We had moved from the boudoir to an upmarket gym.) (I never knew before today, or could it be tomorrow, that chariots had the ability not to mention audacity, to swing low wherever they wanted and whenever the mood so took them.) “See how he works those weights,” said the Chariot, “pumping up his muscles to make them look like Popeye’s, only to end up rather cockeyed: an awesome-chested arse-less wonder desperately searching for Arthur J. Pye.
Temporality does this to us, no matter who we think we are. It reads from the Book of Ephemerality, the penultimate chapter of which reminds young women of the age-old proverb that beauty is skin deep and says to young men who body build that by the time they reach the age of 40 younger men will point at them and say, “That’s a magnificent body you’ve built for yourself … shame about the bay window!”
Do you ever have the feeling that you continually wake from a beautiful dream into a carnival freak show?
How I ever got back to my seat overlooking the River Great Ouse, I suppose I will never know, and neither will you unless I lie. But whilst I had been away, someone had stuck a plaque on the back of my seat, which said, “Here sits a right silly Tw..!” I am sorry to disappoint you, but the plaque in question had always been there; always. In fact, almost every park bench in the meadow bore a memorial plaque.
The inconsolability that follows the loss of a loved one creates the need to make material a memory that one can reach out and touch. My encounter with my own mortality had reminded me of this, that the fear of ephemerality is for most, not all but most, not so much the loss of ourselves but the loss of someone close to us, someone so dear, so precious that the thought of being left alone in a world of utter indifference is the thought that is unthinkable.
In fairy tales, heroes and heroines frequently die of a broken heart. Yet for us in our ephemeral world where everything ends but not that easily, we have to endure our broken hearts and somehow learn to live with them. They are perhaps, after all, all that there is in our fleeting lives which seem to go on and on and on and probably do forever.
Requiescat in pace.
Copyright © 2018-2025 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.
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