Counting Cars

We used to count cars, my brother and me,
Lean on garden gate all summertime long,
We yearned for adventure and to be free,
We were so vivid, so young and so strong.

On warm afternoons, the cars would go by,
Some yellow, some red, some blue and some green,
We'd pick a colour and then we would try
To count the number of cars we had seen.

I always picked red, you always picked blue,
Wistfully watched as the cars shimmered past,
I was only eight but already knew
That long afternoons were not meant to last.

Thirty years later, your present my past,
And my past your future - who would have known
That patterns in childhood don't always last,
And things that define us can be outgrown.

The game that we played was simply untrue,
I'm always red but you'll never be blue.


My brother is two and a half years younger than me. He lives in LA with his wife and two children. His is the executive editor of the Sunday Times and also writes freelance for GQ and Conde Nast amongst others. He was the ghost writer of Ozzy Osborne's autobiography and writes a spoof health column with Ozzy for the ST and GQ. He has written two books - War Reporting for Cowards (about his time spent as an embedded journalist with the marines in the Iraq war) and Death by Leisure, about the absurdities of LA. He was living in New York at the time of the terrorist attacks and wrote a very moving article about witnessing the towers falling, which was shortlisted for an award. I'm very proud of him, mainly because he is a gentle, kind man, who loves his wife and children and thinks of me often.