It is New Year’s Eve 1969 and David has much to look forward to. He has managed to stay up until midnight, unlike the previous year, and he is the life and soul of the party. He mingles with the guests carrying his pint of dandelion and burdock and proffering what his mother calls “savoury bites” of cocktail sausages, pineapple chunks, freshly skewered from a Del Monte tin, and Cheshire cheese cubes, all delicately presented on cocktail sticks stuck in a foil wrapped half a grapefruit.
If he could freeze time he would do it now, in a room full of laughing family and friends with him hovering between childhood and adulthood dispensing bonhomie and savoury bites.
But he cannot freeze time and the coming decade will bring him to the realisation that such moments are fleeting and the time between them is often punctuated by bewildering changes, trials and setbacks.
On this night he is only aware of certainties. By the time he is preparing to celebrate the arrival of the next decade his world will be immeasurably larger and the distance between people, experiences and the Reso and his new world will have expanded beyond recognition leaving everything in his life an accelerating blur.
But for this one evening full of promise he has only the order in which to kiss the younger and prettier of his aunties to worry about and on the distant horizon the move to secondary school in the coming September. Life will not get any sweeter it seems.
Ambrose Conway 