We've come a long way, baby

I found Spring this morning, sitting in the formal garden at the Mansion House smoking cigarettes and drinking hot chocolate. No coat, just the sun on my face and a butterfly for company; a Tortoiseshell I think, drawn not to me but to the prolific proud lilac tulips with perfect petals offered up to the sky.

The butterfly's metamorphosis from egg to grub to chrysalis to adult is a treacherous journey travelled with no known compass to help navigate the obstacles of inquisitive beaks, unpredicted frosts, attentive groundskeepers and a thousand and one other perils. But he - or she - had made it, had survived the dangers, had emerged the other side, stretched out her wings and leapt into the air. Her mid-morning snack of nectar was well deserved.

Our own transformation is no less dramatic. From pin head sized egg to squabblesome toddler, from skulking teenager to strapping five or six footer. But what of the more personal metamorphosis we sometimes undergo, the subtle shifts in being that we experience as adults?

This time last year, my good friend Liz was about to celebrate her 40th birthday. Liz is an attractive, witty and generous woman, great company and a wonderful companion. We'd supported each other through the traumas of our coincidentally simultaneous break-ups with our long-term partners. Ridden the rollercoasters of raw emotion in a fortuitously synchronised fashion such that when one of us was careering to the bottom of the dip, the other was at the top of the slope, ready to haul and cajole and hand-hold the other back up again.

Looking over my shoulder twelve months on, I can see that when we set out to celebrate that milestone birthday we'd already survived the worst but had, in the process, retreated into our own chrysalises. If our metaphorical wings were perhaps not still broken they were not quite fully mended either. We had an inkling of this at the time, of course, but perhaps not as clearly as we have now when we reflect on it.

It is notoriously difficult after the event to recapture the true feelings that one has at the time, and it is quite rightly no longer a topic on which Liz and I dwell. So it was with quite a shock that I came across something that I wrote almost exactly a year ago to the day. I'm reproducing it here not because I think it's in any way good as a piece of writing - which it's not - but because it captures so precisely the raw nature of the feelings I had then - and in doing so enables me to appreciate how far along the journey of that personal metamorphosis I've come since.

The all day drinkers

The all day drinkers sit on benches
and squall with each other
heads and flushed faces below the casting lines of
the fishermen who lace their creels
with boxes of maggots and horizon stuck eyes

The old boys leaning on knotty sticks
with knotted brows and heads full of war glories
glance at the stay-at-home mums pushing
sticky-faced toddlers in four wheeled flotillas
as the wind whips their voices away on the current
to the ears of the school-dodging teens
sucking cigarettes and flinging cans at the gulls

The waves crash and foam
dragging shingle and flotsam from the depths of the ocean
a thousand messages
in empty bottles bleached by the sun.
I drop my stone heavy heart into the water
whisper goodbye to the wind
in hope it will reach your ears
one day

Happy birthday for Saturday, Liz. We've come a long way, baby.