My Dad was a Coventry man. So was his dad, and his dad, my great-grandfather, the gloriously named Herbert Harry Harris. There are fewer Coventry Harrises now (hello, Uncle Mike) but when I was a boy there were plenty and we went there often.
My memories of early childhood visits to Coventry, are mostly like everyone else’s memories of visiting grandparents in a different town, random and disjointed.
I remember the smell of my Grandma’s Embassy No. 1s.
I remember hitting my sister with a golf club in the garden.
I remember the metallic, nicotine taste of the steamed-up window of a maroon corporation bus going past Owen Owen in Broadgate.
Yes. When I was a child, I used to lick the condensation off bus windows.
But best of all, I remember going to Coundon Road to see the rugby.
In those days, Coventry were the best club rugby union side in England. And in all that great team, the finest and the most exciting player was David Duckham, who sadly died earlier this week.
David Duckham was simply magnificent. Swift, sleek, muscular, he was powerful and elusive with ball in hand and fearless in the tackle, a uniquely appealing player at a time when English rugby boasted relatively few greats; a hero who still looms very large in my memory.
The Bible is built around memory.
The memory of heroes. The memory of places people go because their family once lived there. Coventry for me – Bethlehem for Joseph and Mary. The memory of God’s goodness. The memory of how things used to be better: “Remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing”, goes one complaint; “the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions and the garlic”. The memories stack up like groceries.
Tonight, I’m out with a group of very old friends and the evening will be nothing but memories. We’ll remember ancient history, the things that used to be better, and we’ll tease each other about who we were at fifteen.
But we’ll also remember who we are now, and I reckon that’s the most important and the most beautiful thing about memory. Not that it’s all in the past, but that the stock is always, constantly and wonderfully, being replenished.
So, have a good weekend.
I’m aiming to do something I’ll remember when Monday comes around again.
Because I have a vague memory that somehow Monday always does.