The world needs ordinary people
Doing ordinary things,
Not striving for the highest peaks
Or surfing the unmanageable wave
But walking the home hills,
Or courting a domestic sea.

People like that will never
Fire a child's admiration.
No open top bus for them
Heroes in their own town.
Knowing their exploits will not
Win anyone Trivial Pursuits.

Such people move unheeded
In and out of the landscape
Keeping their own clock,
Their own arcane knowledge.
Their own respect for each other
Though to others distinctly odd.

Thinking of Eric, how he would catch
The late night bus to Aurora
Picking up fish and chips on the way
Ready for the ebb at dawn
To renew his colloquy
With a taciturn sea.

(I sailed with Eric once
I tell a lie - we drifted.
A helicopter crashed off Thorney
Two men jumped out.
Our engine wouldn't start.
We wished them well).

But was he ordinary?
Your average pater familiar arse
Takes his impediments down to the beach
And lolls in the ripples at his feet.
It's not he lacks for wonder
But that for him is an answer.

For us it is the question,
A wonder that sets us off against
What is beyond ourselves
Even when sleeping within call
Of a town, a post office, a pub
To feel in the night the largeness of things.

So yes, we are ordinary
But no way average.
No sponsor doorsteps us.
All we wish is to slip away
From some sly harbour
To a quarrelsome sea.

And may we always do so
Unmarked by column inches,
Unrewarded by ejaculatory champagne,
Unseen except by some sour witness,
'You've just sailed across in that?
'You're mad. Bloody mad, you!'

Time then to toast the ordinary man
Doing exceptional things
That are ordinary to him
Not out of modesty
But what to him seem natural
Leaves others silent.

What then of the man who
Without leading, led.
Who doing what he must
Charted a track for others
Over unmarked waters.
Such are surely special.

So, thoughtful as at a golden wedding
With all its lingering sunsets
We now look back to cradle days
And how we came to where we are
Able to tell the world.
'It is (mainly) because of Eric'.