Frank Turner: Love Ire & Song

A teacher of mine once told me that life was just a list of disappointments and defeats, and you could only do your best. And I said: well that's a fucking cop out, you're just washed up and you're tired, and when I get to your age, well, I won't be such a coward. But these days I sit at home, I'm known to shout at my TV, and punk rock didn't live up to what I'd hoped that it could be. And all the things that I believed with all my heart when I was young are just coasters for beers and clean surfaces for drugs, and I've packed all my pamphlets with my bibles at the back of the shelf.

Well it was bad enough, the feeling, the first time it hit, when you realized your parents let the world all go to shit, and that the values and ideals for which so many fought and died had been killed off in committees and left to die by the way-side. But it was worse when we turned to the kids on the left, and got let down again by some poor excuse for protest; by idiot fucking hippies in fifty different factions, locked inside some kind of sixties battle re-enactment. So I hung up my banners in disgust and I head for the door.

Oh but once we were young and we were crass enough to care, but I guess you live and learn. We won't make that mistake again. But surely just for one day we could fight and we could win, and if only for a little while, we could insist on the impossible.

Well we've been a good few hours drinking, so I'm going to say what everyone's thinking: if we're stuck on this ship and it's sinking, then we might as well have a parade. Because if it's still going to hurt in the morning, and a better plans yet to get forming, then where's the harm spending an evening in manning the old barricades?

So come on old friends, to the streets, let's be 1905 but not 1917. Let's be heroes, let's be martyrs, let's be radical thinkers who never have to test drive the least of their dreams. Let's divide up the world into the damned and the saved, and ride to the valley like the old Light Brigade, and straighten our backs, and not be afraid, and theyll celebrate our deaths with a national parade.

Leave the morning to the morning, pain can be killed with aspirin tablets and vitamin pills. But memories of hope and of glorious defeat are a little bit harder to beat.