This piece is my contribution to *Stories from the Jukebox*, a weekly writing project where writers take a single song and use it as a spark. This week’s prompt is Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles. You can find the original prompt here: Stories from the Jukebox.
The story goes that George Harrison wrote “Here Comes the Sun” after sagging off a meeting. Apple business. Lawyers. Contracts. Endless miserable grown-up nonsense. Instead of sitting through it, he slipped away to Eric Clapton’s place, wandered out into the garden with a guitar, and suddenly there was a song.
I’ve always liked that phrase. Sagging off. Where I’m from, we’d probably say bunking off. Skipping work. Quietly dodging whatever sensible thing the day had planned for you.
For a long time, my wife and I had a day each year where we did exactly that. We simply didn’t go to work. No explanation. No excuses. We just took the day and went off to do something ridiculous.
We called it Bowen’s Day.
Bowen wasn’t his real name, of course. His name was Eoin Bailey, but somewhere along the way, Eoin Bailey became Eoin ‘Bowen’ Bailey, and eventually just Bowen if you knew him well enough. He was a Dublin lad and a mandolin player, and a beautiful one at that. The sort of bloke who could arrive at a barbecue, pull a battered mandolin out of a case, and suddenly the whole evening had a soundtrack.
Back in the late eighties, the Irish music scene in London was thriving. Irish pubs, Irish clubs, rooms packed shoulder to shoulder with people listening to live music. Bowen was everywhere on that circuit. West London, especially, but really all over the city. If you spent any time around the Irish music scene back then, you knew who he was.
He wasn’t a songwriter. He played mandolin alongside a singer. But when Bowen turned up somewhere, the place filled up. Friends everywhere. Always another gig waiting. Eight days a week if he could manage it, and if he could somehow shoehorn another night in on top of that, he absolutely would.
The economics of the job were fairly straightforward. Earn twenty quid, drink thirty, buy a kebab, get a cab home from somewhere like Guildford and wake up the next morning with about two pounds in your pocket and absolutely no regrets.
At one point, he was renting a room in my wife’s flat before she and I got together properly. When we finally decided to start our life together, we had to move him out so we could live there. Bowen couldn’t have been happier for us. So we packed his things into our cars and moved him into a rather nice new place.
Only later did we realise that somewhere along the journey, I had managed to tread dog shit all the way up his brand-new staircase carpet.
Bowen thought this was absolutely hilarious. “It’s a sign of good luck!” he declared.
Sadly, the luck didn’t last very long.
Not long after that, he was preparing for a big trip abroad he’d been saving for. Suitcase packed. Cash for the journey sitting in a jar on the mantelpiece. The night before he was due to fly, he went to bed after what was probably a fairly heroic evening in the pub. Sometime during the night he got up to go to the bathroom.
Instead of turning right, he turned left and walked straight out through a set of French windows onto a flat roof. They found him the next morning. He wasn’t even thirty.
So after that, for a long time, my wife and I would sag off work on the day he died. We’d take the day and go and do something daft in his honour. Roller coasters. Seaside arcades. Pointless road trips just for the sake of it. Nothing solemn about it. Just a day spent living slightly badly, exactly the way Bowen would have approved.
That was Bowen’s Day.
Life moves on, of course. Children arrive. Jobs get serious. Responsibilities creep in. You don’t just get to sag off work the way you used to. But Bowen’s picture still sits in our house. Not tucked away in a box somewhere. Out where we can see him, and every year when that day comes around, we always raise a glass and remember our dear friend.
But sometimes the best thing you can do in life is sag off whatever you’re supposed to be doing and go and enjoy the sunshine.
Bowen sounds like quite the character. Cool memories of a cool dude. Sometimes, life demands a good sag off.
Loved this one!