Moon of Alabama

When is the right time to say goodbye? And when is it better to stay and face the music (even if dancing can't be contemplated)? Only hindsight makes sense of the actions we take  -  we overlay a skin of meaning onto the bones of the facts, pull it into shape and fashion it into a body of evidence. Posthumous, but nonetheless convincing. 

I'm still deciding. So come on and let me know: should I stay or should I go? 

Music always has the answer. Is it to be Stay (just a little bit longer)? Go, walk out the door (and survive)? Or Burning down the house? Je ne regrette rien.

Be

Life is a series of moments all called now.

We don't know how many of these moments we have left. How many of them do we miss, thinking about the past, worrying about the future? How many of them do we waste doing nothing worthwhile? How many are ruined with unkindness, unpleasantness? Ticked away in boredom?

I know I'm alive when life takes me by the hand, grabs me by the throat, makes my heart skip a beat, kicks me in the guts, looks me in the eye and says: game on. I want to feel the blood rushing, the world spinning, to stay up all night, to stay in bed all day, to be all used up when I go.

I want to live rather than exist. I want to sing not whisper. I want to be the flame, not the moth. Dance with me.

Love in a Minor Key

George moved to America after the war.  He moved there with his friend David - they played together in a band and wanted to find their fortune.

David eventually married, although George never did. He worked in a series of dull day jobs in Philadelphia, the city where David lived. Then moved to New Jersey when David's moved there, and worked in a sugar refinery until he retired, playing jazz piano in clubs in the evenings.

George lived alone until he retired. Over eighty now, he resides in a nursing home after a stroke last year, the last-but-one of the seven brothers.  Dad, the youngest, goes regularly to visit him and has arranged for him to play the piano every day for the other residents.  Dad was clearing out the last few things from George's apartment - only a few cardboard boxes of items to show for a life, and mostly records.  A few of them were George's own recordings from before he left England, with his trio.

"What's this?" dad asked, holding up a big old reel of tape.

"Oh yes," said George. "That's my Songbook. I haven't been able to play it since about 1975, it needs a reel-to-reel player and no-one has one any more".

Dad brought it back to Britain, took it to a specialist company who made it into a CD: George singing and playing 25 original songs. It's recorded in someone's living room but the piano, and the quality, and sound balance are good - it could have been recorded yesterday.  Heartbreaking lyrics, imaginative composition, faultlessly played. Go back to the 1950s and remember this is a man who played sometimes with George Shearing, who jammed at Ronnie Scott's.

Some of this music is just too wonderful to sit on a CD in my house, and the untold story behind the lyrics of unrequited love makes those minor chords even more poignant. What shall I do with it, I wonder?

Fingers On Buzzers

There's a new quiz. A kind of can't-be-arsed, yet musical, theme. Answering is both undemanding and anonymous. How fortunate.

Several questions. Go on.

• Are we human, or are we dancers?
• Are you experienced?
• Is this the way to Amarillo?
• Do you know the way to San Jose?
• Should I stay or should I go?
• What have you done for me lately?
• Is there life on Mars?
• Don't you want me baby?
• Do you wanna touch me?
• What difference does it make?

Be philosophical or factual. It doesn't make any difference.

In Between Days

If you know the songs, you know the girl.

Some people just get it. Some people just don't. I'm complicated  -  but so are all the interesting people. There's always a soundtrack running in my head. Sometimes I'm singing the songs, sometimes they're singing to me.

Poetic Licence

My poeting continues. I've managed to keep up with the NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) ambition, although the quality remains variable. I'm going through a relatively prolific phase (although that's starting from a low base).

I'm taking an on-line poetry course which is stretching me: I like the structure of the exercises, and the feedback I'm getting is constructive and thoughtful. I wasn't sure how well an on-line forum would work, but I'm impressed with its effectiveness, and the feel already of becoming a group.

Writing a poem is quite meditative, the same zone as playing an instrument, where doing one thing with complete focus prevents any other thoughts from straying in. It makes my head feel that it's a completely still, clear pool of water.

Calm clarity is good. I can't go back to the mud and turmoil. You know what I'm saying.

Ivory Flower

What is a piano if it is not played?

Is it still an instrument if its keys are not touched, if its rosewood does not resonate with the swell of a symphony or the twinkling flutter of a playful scherzo?

Already I am troubled with echoes of our music in the quiet empty space behind my eyelids in the dawn.

Quiz of the Week

It's an easy one this week. No multiple choices, just answer in the Comments (and yes, you can be anonymous if that's how you like it).

Which song would you associate with me?

I'm intrigued.

Don't Get Weird On Me, Baby

“Which is your favourite Lloyd Cole song?” The Farmer's Boys were playing in the background, but it couldn’t be the Eighties because we have children and jobs and mortgages and directorships and teams of staff and all sorts of things that seemed inconceivable in those days. It was one of the rare sunny afternoons in London when for a moment you feel as if you are on holiday Conversations like this are important in their small way. A question like that is a short cut to a sweeping swathe of common ground, a history written in music where we listened to the same songs and maybe on the same day, in different cities or, who knows, on Blackheath in the same pub.

He went for Perfect Skin. I’d have guessed that. Not because it was the main hit, but because he was in love with the girl in the song. All the indie boys wanted this girl, and we all wanted to be her. We might not have had perfect skin, it was our late teens after all, but hell we could be sexually enlightened by Cosmopolitan. I confused desire with enjoyment, at that time. I so wanted to be liberated and bold and free, and I so wanted to be turned on. I was a raging torrent of longing, frustration and hormones: and the boy to girl ratio was 12:1 in my college, 3:1 more widely in the university. No shortage of prospective playmates then.

I would start enthusiastically, give and ye shall receive, right? But it didn’t work like that, for all the good manners and fine breeding of these boys. It took me a long while to realise that, feminist or not, it’s only sensible - in the bedroom at least - to follow the principle of Ladies First. Despite my best attempts (and there were a fair few) my university years were orgasm-free, or at least when anyone else was present. I had a pretty good handle on the mechanics of boy-meets-girl but that isn’t the important thing, is it?

My theory now, for good sex from an early age, would be to get trained by a more experienced partner. Two young people trying to work it out as they go along might never get there. I bet there are a lot of couples like this, feeling deep down that they never quite got the hang of it, that other people in films and books and on tv, and in real life too, are having much better sex than they are.

I’d also recommend lessons not just in how to do sex, proper lustful, unembarrassed sex, but in how to talk about it. How can you ask for what you want, say what you like, give instructions or beg, if you don’t know the words? This is a barrier too: so many people who can do it, but couldn’t discuss it to save their lives. Or their marriages, for that matter.

Some people did have the advantage of a misspent youth and joyfully, eagerly, learned this stuff early on. But the kind of girl that would teach you these things is not necessarily the person you would take home to meet your parents, the kind of person you imagined marrying, being a mother to your children. That’s a role for Nice Girls. And Nice Girls don’t want to do that dirty stuff, hear those filthy words or - god forbid - say them. Do they? Or Nice Boys either. And it’s nigh on impossible to introduce these things later, I’d imagine.

My favourite Lloyd Cole song is Rattlesnakes. The girl in that song gets to look cool alright, doesn’t she? And read great books and carry a gun. Her heart’s like crazy paving (oh great lyric) and there are all sorts of things she needs.

Me too, me too....

Vice Squad

A long drive to Norfolk and back this weekend presented the ideal opportunity to indulge in an array of in-car treats.


I first used to drive to Norfolk when my boyfriend (later Husband No. 1) was doing his PhD at UEA. I would travel from work in London on a Friday night, crawl out of the City, crawl up the M11, crawl up the horrific slow, narrow, interminable tree-lined A11. I was convinced I would die on that road, attempting to overtake yet another tractor on a blind bend. And all the while watching, watching the temperature gauge, just willing the car not to overheat.


My first car was red Austin 1100 selected with the assistance of Steroid Steve, the boyfriend of the moment (I was on the rebound, and he had an immaculately restored TR6).  Reverse gear had packed up, so it was very important never to take a wrong turn. Luckily I'm a good navigator so I was ok on that one. The radio and the heater had also packed up, and there was a little hole on the floor under the carpet where it had rusted through, so the carpets were soggy and smelled of pond-weed.


When I traded upmarket for a boyfriend, I also ended up with a better car.Husband No 1's mother sold me her white Honda Civic. It was a tough bargain (my father in law was a bank manager) and it had a Hondamatic gearbox. Driving always reminded me of pressing the electric treadle on my mum's sewing machine.  We got 110,000 miles out of that car, although the last 20,000 were very fraught.


Next came an Escort, bought from someone at work (the sly cow). It had an automatic choke, and starting it up in cold weather was as delicate an operation as micro-surgery. Don't turn it far enough, and nothing doing. Turn it a tiny fraction too far and the engine would flood and it would take ten minutes to clear it and try again.  The bodywork was a dark orange colour that most of us would call rust. That was fortunate as it hid a multitude of sins.


After a number of missed trains, meetings, films and so forth we bit the bullet and bought a better (more expensive...) car, the latest model Honda Civic. After all, the last one had done us proud, even though it felt like driving an overlocker. It was a smart navy blue, and he got custody of it when we got divorced. I got the cat, though.


I was by that time in charge of my own company car scheme, and for around nine years until the tax regime changed I had a series of ever more decent motors. A red MX-3, a big long-nosed Jag, a couple of Beemers, a Merc. After a series of Freelanders I'm back to a BMW again; and after a series of silver cars, I've gone back to an eye-catching shiny bright scarlet.


People who drive mediocre motors don't get it. They think that good cars just aren't worth the money: I used to think that too. But you never see people who have a nice car going back downmarket. Once you splash out, you realise that you were wrong all those years, and that you spend hours in the car every month, and that your journey is utterly transformed when you are listening to your favourite CD on a crisp, deep Blaupunkt stereo whilst you nip easily past all the caravans in smooth, swishing, swanky comfort.


So what are my in-car treats? One of my favourites, me being Little Miss Type-A and all, is to set my destination on the satnav, note the estimated arrival time and then try to beat it, through superior route selection and faster driving.  Another is to try and achieve the minimum possible fuel consumption (hurrah for my digital gadgets). But the best one is really, really bad. Why pick your nose or ring sex chat lines on the hands-free, when there's a more satisfying, more secret vice to be visited?

On journeys on my own, I sing. Not just a little bit of humming along now and again, I'm talking about full-on, know-all-the-words singing every single song on the CD. And the really bad part is, sometimes I'll choose CDs purely because they are really hard or funny or catchy to sing.  I like to be challenged by something too low (Right Said Fred, Crash Test Dummies, George Michael), an impossible vocal range (Hall & Oates, Eurythmics) or something sung beautifully but as dripping in cheesiness as an apres-ski fondue. For this, one can't of course surpass The Carpenters. 


My favourite Carpenters songs to sing along to are:

•  Yesterday Once More
• For All We Know
• We've Only Just Begun
• Mr Postman

It doesn't mean I'm compromising my taste in music. On no. You know how discerning I am. It's not about listening: it's about singing.  And it's one of the things I like to do when there's no-one else there. Some of the other things might compromise my driving.

Gift

“I hate country and western”, I stated with absolute certainty.


He looked at me disbelievingly. “You haven’t been listening to the right recordings”.


Damn right. I haven’t been listening to any of it, any time, no way, no how. Rawhide. Dolly and her freakish breasts. Kenny Rogers and his Coward of the County. Bleargh. Yawn. No no no.


“You could like it”. He spoke with authority, and perhaps there was even at hint of the patronising there, as if we were speaking about Shakespeare or Wagner. I felt slightly irritated. After all, he hardly knew me.


I mentioned some of the music I enjoyed and it drew a blank. So I threw down the gauntlet. “Ok then. Find me something I like.” He raised an eyebrow and the conversation moved on.


Later, much later, he sent me a song: Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Sudden Gift of Fate. I loved it. I told him. Then he sent me another one, Late For Your Life, with a rather cryptic note. I listened - and I realised that he had the measure of me better than I thought. So much for my mystery. I’m off to buy a new CD.

Green Day

Billie Joe Armstrong ought to be a laughing stock, for a number of reasons.

1. Punk is English, and he and his band come from California.
2. Punk is dead, anyway.
3. He married in his early twenties and had a family and still happily wed, which is not very rock'n'roll.
4. He has a girl's name.
5. He has been in a band with his best friend from school for 23 years, which is not very punk.
6. He wears masses of eyeliner, in his forties.
7. He does cover versions of cheesy songs in the middle of his show (Highway To Hell, anyone?)
8. He brings kids up on stage to sing his songs.

Yet this does not stop him and his music being really cool. He has enough charisma to rock Wembley Stadium (which U2 failed to do last year). He has more energy and zest and passion than any performer I've ever seen. And it somehow makes him really sexy.

I shouldn't, but I would.

Postscript, Monday.

"I bet you like him, mummy, don't you. He looks like he comes from your olden times".