Bloke's Column: Lonely Joe Parker

Kath was the whole reason I got into music.

I am sitting against the fence at the side of a festival stage. I am seventeen and there's nothing I don't know about music. There's nothing I don't dread about girls. It's the middle of the afternoon, high cider time, and sat here I am feeling baked, self-consscious and more lonely than I've ever felt.

Kath sidles up out of nowhere, literally swimming into my vision. She is also seventeen, and there's nothing she doesn't know about music, and she's wearing a bandana and a smile brighter than the sun that sparkles through the cider she pours for us from the bottle hidden in her bag. The festival is on again.

Years later, at night on a train heading south, I am wading in and out of sleep when the milky glow of lights in the darkness catches my eye. I sit up and gaze out at the fires and the haze and the youth, the clockwork jumble of kids and hormones and cheap beer and drugs, and conjure Kath back again, rolling the years away and drowning in my wine and my memories as Tom Waits rasps on. Arithmetick, arithmetock, Alice.

A few days on, as the festival dies around us, we're sitting in the rain cross-legged and quietly arguing on trestle tables, she gets up and flounces into the rain. I'll never see her again. But the world is a bigger place now.