This must be the place I waited years to leave

Each morning after Sunblest

feel the benefit, mental arithmetic

I waited by the staffroom

in time for benediction

Living a law just short of delusion

When we fall in love there’s confusion

This must be the place I waited years to leave

To our voices nobody’s listening

We shiver in the rain by the touchline

Then a coach ride to the station

‘My lord, the carriage awaiteth!’

Living a law just short of delusion

When we fall in love there’s confusion

This must be the place I waited years to leave

And how? How long?

I’m listening to the words I thought I’d never hear again

a litany of saints and other ordinary men

Kneeling on the parquet

whatever has gone wrong?

The fear and feeling hopelessness

I don’t want to belong

I dreamt I was back in uniform

and a candidate for examination

History, someone had blundered

and a voice rapped ‘knuckle under!’

Living a law just short of delusion

When we fall in love there’s confusion

This must be the place I waited years to leave

And how? How long?

1990. I used to have a dream that I was back in the sixth form at grammar school sitting an exam, thinking, ‘How can this be happening?’ Sunblest was and is a brand of white sliced bread which we ate toasted for breakfast (although, on reflection, I preferred brown Hovis). I intended that the title in particular could also refer to the communist past of the central and eastern European countries recently liberated from Soviet domination, which to their citizens might now seem like a bad dream.