Grey Power
for Bert Collyer
When people talk about grey power
I shall always think about him:
standing outside John St market with Simon and me,
Simon with the New Communist Party paper, the New Worker,
me with the Morning Star,
Bert with Grey Power,
the radical pensioners' paper.
I think I never saw him sell a copy,
except to one of us;
if we sold one paper between the three of us in a morning
we counted ourselves lucky
(though Bert would usually buy
to send to relatives and friends throughout the country).
It was the presence that was important,
reminding passers-by of alternative voices,
not drowned out by the megafinanced tits-n-bum brigade.
Between our rare sales
we talk politics,
he holding forth on the ineffectiveness of most pensioners' organisations
(I think it was anger at being patronised which fuelled his fury)
me explaining how to me materialism was not incompatible
with that shorthand 3-letter name we give to the non-contingent reality
which governs everything
we are, think, and do.
Bert has now gone into that reality
and while he didn't really share my belief in it,
I don't think that really matters,
any more than a disbelief in gravity
allows us to step out of 13th-storey windows
and float gently to the ground.
What we profess to believe
matters less,
it seems to me,
than what we do,
and I can almost hear
Bert's west country burr
arguing with St Christopher at the pearly gates,
and selling him a copy of Grey Power
as the gates swing open to let him through
to that Kingdom, we are taught,
lies within us.
And I'd like to imagine St C with a bundle of Morning Stars under his arm,
and Bert buying three or four hundred
to send to relatives and friends
all over the world.
June 27, 2000
