Pissing on the fire
The ghost of a memory
What kind of memory is that? my mind says to me as I try to remember a long-ago camping trip. The memory, the one about pissing on the Boy Scouts’ fire, has been conflated with an earlier time when I’d gone fishing over the mountain with Phil Chip. It was that one I was trying to recall. A less contentious time when we were about fourteen and had pitched our tent in a farmer’s field in Gwynfe.
While trying to reconstruct that experience, (our first time camping in a nylon fly-sheeted tent, with tubular aluminium poles and a sweaty groundsheet), I’d stumbled over this other, half-formed recollection of myself and another Phil (Davies), pissing on a fire and laughing while looking at the stars. We were seventeen and needless to say, both shitfaced. And that’s about all I can remember. So I messaged him, the second Phil. We haven’t communicated for years, and I am now waiting for his response.
We were always a bad influence on each other, somehow abandoning all good intentions of staying sober whenever we went out. Which wasn’t that often luckily. It was this second Phil that would also accompany me later that year on the occasion of my eighteenth birthday, New Year’s Eve 1981. I lost him that time as he decided to walk the seven miles home despite a drink-induced meander and sub-zero temperatures. He was meant to come home with me, but…
