Tripping Back to Childhood

I saw that M & M man in the bar last night: he looked a bit the worse for wear. I bought us both a beer and we went out into the garden, by the river. He’d finished off the last of his mushies the night before. Just before bed, boiled them up with milk and made Horlix; a shot of Canadian whisky. The idea was to have interesting dreams, but the night was more interesting than he’d intended.

“I went to bed and nodded off, then woke after half an our or so. My eye’s were streaming and I was sweating. I was in a whole new situation so far as sense and perception were. It was very trippy, psychedelic, like the LSD trips of the 60s I’ve read about. Moving colours and shapes, whorls, webs, structures.

“There was quite a bit of physical discomfort; my stomach felt bloated. I went to the bathroom, and it felt really trippy in there, with overtones of being in the bathroom of a house on a tropical island. I tried to throw up and take a shit, but nothing happened. Back to bed again and then the fun really started.

“I was drifting in and out of sleep. The theme of the night was my long dead Grandmother – she died nearly 40 years ago. I swung between intense memories of grief at her death, and happy memories of visiting her and Granda, reading my comics, recollecting the house they lived in, the hallway which fascinated me because there were so many potential visitors passing through it.

Maybe I’ve never before grieved properly for any of my grandparents, I was too young. Last night was hard work, grief is, but it feels now like a release. I was crying a lot; I was five years old for much of the night, but I could stand outside that too and marvel at the psycho-therapuetic nature of the mushies.

There was more: other memories of childhood. That wonderment that Wordsworth and Clare write about.

“Feel fucked today mind. Like a real psychonaught, exhausted after a difficult journey through long buried memory..." He looked at the river going by, the wee clouds of midgies. "The sub theme, aside from Grandma, was Top Cat. Must have ben a big figure in my childhood's imaginative scenery."