Where did my mojo go-go?

Wow! My first post since January 8, 2025. What on earth has happened to me? Good question – I just don’t know.

Today’s painting, from the last day of 2024, is taken from The Idylls of the King, Tennyson. “The olde order changeth lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”

This quote is used in my Old Boys magazine at the end of each school year when the students leave the college and go out into the real world. This happened to me in 1962 – 63 years ago. Certainly I changed, and for the better, without the college. Whether the college changed or not, in my absence, I really don’t know. I suppose it did. It became co-educational, quite the thing for a boys’ boarding school. It expanded into larger grounds. It tore down at least two of the old houses, including the one in which I boarded for four years. I read about these things, but I have only been back on one or two occasions, so I don’t really know. And living in Canada, I rarely see any old boys from the school. They don’t cross the pond to visit me.

I receive the old school magazine regularly, by e-mail. However, I no longer recognize faces or places, unless the places are totally unchanged since I was there. And not many of them are. The most important page for me has become the obituaries, and I study with care those who have passed on before me and those who remain. I grieve when I see the names of old friends. But I grieve even more when I see the names of people so much younger than me falling by the wayside.

As for that mojo of mine, well, I guess that writing on a regular basis has become more and more difficult. “Don’t sit with your head in your hands thinking of time past,” says the Spanish poet. Yet time past seems preferable, in many ways, to time future. I am beginning to feel a bit like a pin-cushion, on account of all the needles now being stuck into me. Perhaps that’s where all my mojo went? Still, for anyone interested, I am still here. Still happy. I am working on my latest novel and I have two books of poetry waiting to be published. So maybe my mojo hasn’t done a bunk, just my blog mojo! I shall have to kick start it. Or maybe I’ll get that little yellow duck who wears blue gumboots to stand on a brick and give me a hearty booted boost. Yup! That should do the trick.

And so, in the words of Dylan Thomas, “I’ll take a bow, and say ‘good-bye’ but just for now.