'Wouldn't It Be Great If...?'

Now there’s a question we’ve all asked at one time or another. Often in moments of excess consumption. There you are, sitting in the pub, chatting away, letting the cares of the world wash over you like dust in the desert, and some smartalec begins a question with ‘wouldn’t it be great if…?’

Happened to me just the other day, now I come to think of it. Wouldn’t it be great if we got in contact with Guy Clark and flew him over from Texas for an acoustic concert in the back room of a pub in Cornwall. A very nice pub, as it happens, and I’m sure Guy would have loved to do it, but the trouble with that sort of plan is carrying it out. The plot was hatched in December, the gig was planned for August, it’s now April, and I’m pretty sure the gig schedule of a country and western legend doesn’t allow him to drop everything and fly to distant Celtic Britain at a mere four months’ notice.

Especially when nobody’s given a moment’s thought to the money.

Maybe next year. We all have a ‘pending’ file somewhere in our subconscious for the long-term storage of harebrained schemes, purposeless plans, abandoned projects, and the 45 books we’re going to get around to writing if only we can find the time. Doubtless the Richard Bransons of this world are where they are because they have the knack of turning these daft ideas into money, but for most of us it’s usually a case of ‘do what you can and do what you must’. As Bob Dylan sang all those years ago.

Except sometimes the harebrained schemes get carried out. Especially when you’re young and stoned and fanciful.

It would have been Yaya who said it. He was the one who did most of the travelling, so it follows he did most of the thinking about travelling. Somewhere on my mothers’ bookshelves is a dusty copy of our school magazine from 1968 or something like that in which Yaya dutifully describes, in his best ‘edited to protect the sensibilities of parents and teachers’ style, how he and another boy hitch-hiked around Europe at the age of seventeen. Possibly younger: I may have got these dates wrong.

I know that’s not especially unusual these days. But it was a big deal at a minor boys’ public school in leafy Hertfordshire back in 1968. Christ, we’d only just persuaded them to abandon the collar studs and let us wear our jackets unbuttoned.

Since which time Yaya had also:

- Spent the best part of a year working on a Kibbutz in Israel.

- Travelled across North America and ended up working as lighting engineer for Canada’s leading pop group, Abraham’s Children.

Yes, I know no-one’s heard of them outside Canada.

Yaya’s a few months older than me. But at that point the best I’d managed was a one month Eurail Pass that took me and my girlfriend of the time to Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Cannes.

So Yaya tended to be more confident in all things international. This may have had something to do with altitude - Yaya’s principal distinguishing feature being his height: 6’8". Perhaps the world’s just a little less alarming for a 17 year old schoolboy when everyone’s just that little bit underneath you.

Here’s a picture of Yaya taken at around the same time, with some people of lesser physical stature. You get the idea.


Ya and Libs and Liney

We’ll come back to the 6’8" thing in a while (it has a small but significant part to play in this story). For the time being we need to imagine Yaya sprawled on a bed at 123, wreathed in smoke and with a giant doobie between his lips.

Who else is in the bedroom?

Stu is, for sure. It’s his room. He’s Yaya’s younger brother. For a comparison, mentally shave off 4".

Mark Fowler is probably there. He’s Stu’s best chum. We’ll refer to him as Mark F from now on, to avoid confusion with…

Mark G. that’s me. I might have been there. I could fictionalise myself into this little tableau, but it’s just as likely I was still off at college in London, where I was systematically helping to trash 1, Victory Square, Camberwell (another address we may return to later).

There are various other possibles, but it’s not important. For now let’s just focus on Yaya, legs akimbo and sucking in a great lungful of cannabis sativa and Virginia’s finest, at the very moment Joni starts to sing 'I was a free man in Paris…'

Da dee dah-di dah di-duuum.

‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ says Yaya, ‘to drive down the Champs Elysee with this on the stereo and all the windows wide open…’