THE WEIGHT OF THE AIR





You are eight years old. Your baseball boots, as you put them on, are magical. They are not magical in that they will bestow magical powers on you, real or imagined. They are not magical because you are naïve and misguided. They are not magical because you are young and do not understand them. But it is because you are young that you perceive their mysteriousness so easily (a pair of baseball boots worn by an adult would be just as magical as these, but the chances of a typical adult apprehending their mystery are slim). You are eight years old. As you tie the laces you do not think consciously that you are now wearing magical boots, because the magic you are feeling is completely natural to you and your days, is not questioned for an instant and does not, therefore, require a conscious thought.



It is Salford. It is the seventies. It is the summer holidays and your Dad is working away.



Later on, as an adult, you will look back and see a poor household, in terms of finances and evolution. But for now a block of hazy sunlight coming in from the summer sun outside creates layers of shadowy depths and textures, rendering a familiar room exotic and mysterious to you. Your ego is not sufficiently developed yet for you to wish to replace mystery with understanding. People will later tell you that everything that surrounded you back here is in truth understandable, but here in this moment you are eight and you know better now what you are experiencing than your older self will through his filter of experience and time.

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The baseball boots, with their arcane American associations, are now firmly laced to your feet. You run up the tunnel-like lobby and out of the cave-like front door into the summer light and you see blue, blue sky climbing high above the dock wall, encapsulating you and your whole world in a far away so pristine and clear it feels near to you, almost touchable. The terraced street is weighted down beneath the summer sun with burnt bricks, red and black. The yellow light warms the side of your face with an immediacy you will forget. The streets you run through are cobbled, but patched and bridged with a tarmac that promises to spread in time and take away all cobbled streets forever. You are going to the Top Gardens, the overgrown, derelict wonderland where the local children find their relief from the streets. The air around you is saturated with your awareness of what you know and feel about this seventies moment in your life. Disco and the foreshadowing tremors of punk are in the air. You can taste them there. Your knowledge of the street intrigues, the soap opera and glamour of the bigger kids, the throbbing presence of the unknowable greater world beyond your known borders, hinted at through inscrutable TV news, Star Wars and Jaws and Top Of The Pops and The Magic Roundabout and Grease, they are all there in the air, along with Thor and The Fantastic Four and the hero of the Age, The Incredible Hulk. All of your past is present, and your future too. Your future pushes back on you: the joints smoked in apartments renovated out of slums made mythic in your childhood, college time escapes to Bury and new friends, for discoveries in the art of adulthood, urban streets stretching further and further, twisting and cornering away into infinities of living and scenarios and dreams, layers within layers of countless moments in countless lives, all seering through each other with their right to exist. There is so much held in the weight of the air that you run through, by the magical power of your baseball boots, that you could never list it in your conscious flow of thoughts. Like the mystery of the baseball boots it is something you can only sense, never articulate. You are the observer in this moment and, therefore, its maker. Nobody else could tell you a thing about it. You are the only being in the whole of the cosmos who understands this moment, in all its endless, incomprehensible mystery. It’s not so much that this moment is yours as that this moment is you. It is made out of nothing but you. And voices belonging to others will one day tell you they are an authority on moments that they did not live, but that you did. And that also is an ingredient in your awareness that is so saturating the air you run through to reach the Top Gardens, that overgrown, derelict wonderland, corner of a seventies childhood lived by one child amongst countless on the streets of a mythical Salford.​