hard as it might be to believe there was a time when i was quite innocent. now, here in my thirties, i’m feeling mighty jaded and a little deflated.

driving to la rochelle earlier this year we passed a phenomenon i’d forgotten about.

on the side of the road black silhouettes, some with a red lightning flash at the head, would occasionally puncture the verge of the slick, macadamed surfaces which cut swathes through the fields of the charante-maritime. after a few kilometres of pondering how they resembled discarded props from a fairground ghost train ride and just before they settled into my accepted background of inter city france it dawned on me that each one stood for a death on the autoroute; a real person now cut-out of the communities their macabre mannequins are left to guard.

as i eased open the throttle and the sunroof and headed towards sunshine and the promise of the coast; a beach; a lazy afternoon in a portside cafe eating fresh shellfish with the early summer heat drawing beads of condensation around the neck of a chilled bottle of wine, it struck me how terrifying those ghosts can be if you’ve never faced the fear of them.

before i reached the biscuit coloured stone walls of la rochelle and the sweeping squall of circling seagulls who settle to fight over a tumbled icecream cone; to a lovely day full of memories and photo opportunities i had to drive down haunted roads. in my youthful innocence i would have been terrified of their ghosts, semi-paralysed into tunnel vision, refusing to acknowledge their insistance at the potential perils of the journey. i certainly wouldn’t have conceded the lack of surity they so bleakly, silently stand for. i would have clung to an untenable unreality not tainted by function, to a place with a long way to fall.

nowadays, now that i’ve tumbled some way and hit several painful branches on the way down, the jaded, older me has to learn to live with the intrusion of the harsh realities of real life; of accident and cause, blame and effect; of the dangers of speed or power; and of pure bad fortune and how that saps romance and levity out of the journey.

and takes some of the wind out of my sails.

but while part of experience can taste very bitter i wouldn’t recognise the sharp contrast of bitter to sweet without having driven down that road in the first place. an element of the beauty of innocent expectation is gone forever and can’t be got back, so was left with a choice. i could choose to see their presence as a memento mori or a respect their place in the rememberance of things past and head for the coast.

bob dylan - all the tired horses