Meeting Ziggy in Bewdley

Yesterday I posted a poem I wrote after meeting Ziggy my teenage best friend after 39years. On the day I met him I wrote a poem and it does not seem to work as a poem so I am trying it out as prose.

In Bewdley, waiting to meet Ziggy, I am flooded with a wave of memories and feel pretty overwhelmed by them. There was the cafe near the river where I was chatted up by an attractive fair haired teenager but I remained faithful to my first love who, coincidentally or not worked nearby in the hairdressers shop.

Opposite the George Inn I walked passed the turn off to a house where Ziggy and I had been to a party. Ziggy spent some time there talking to a very pregnant teenager. This excited me at the time as Ziggy had written a song about such an encounter a few days previously. But nothing developed unlike the song.

I walked by the River Severn and passed by the spot where Ziggy and I had rented a boat. We attempted largely unsuccessfully to row upstream against the strong current despite the verbal help of an enthusiastic man on the river bank.

Later I saw the shop where once my cousin Phyl had sold baby clothes from and it was now a hospice charity shop. The same hospice my sister Liz left so much money to in her Will forcing me to meet medics and premature babies and their mums when all I wanted to do was to cry...

Round the corner was a bungalow where my Aunt and Uncle retired to and nearby hidden away the gem of 1690s Quaker Meeting House where more recently I heard the Quaker silence broken by the hoot of a steam train on the Severn Valley Line.

Swimming in these memories I wait on the bridge to meet Ziggy.