It's an 'end of the rainbow' sort of deal

 Regina Spektor's Us is an extraordinary song for me.  It means two very special people to me.  Firstly, it means J, who bought the album (Mary Ann Meet the Gravediggers and Other Stories) home one day, and put it on in the living room. But we only had an ancient playstation hooked up to our tiny tv, and it automatically played the enhanced bit of the cd which was the video for Us, and I was utterly transfixed.  Secondly it means Lu, who told me that people play Us at their wedding because they don't understand what it's about.  And I was amused, very amused.  Like it was a secret joke.

I have taken to turning off the tv in the evenings recently.  A long time ago my best friend's boyfriend, a stoic, no frills sort of man, told me I should watch less tv because it made me sad, and listen to music in the evening instead. I laughed then.  But I think, several years on, there's something there.  TV is deadening.  I have it on for noise and noise alone.  It is rarely on to watch, and even less frequently contains something to inspire me.  I think I rejected it because as a teen I listened to about 8 hours of music a day, almost always in isolation, and it didn't make me feel good.  TV became the other media, the social media, the media that was about outside spaces - spaces outside me - and not the ones inside.

I'm 29.  I'm not the person I was when I was a teen. It's ok to walk the same paths - I won't end up in the same place.

Us is still a beautiful song.  Huge and sweeping.  Sometimes it makes me laugh and sometimes it makes me cry.  Life living with J at uni was, retrospectively, glorious.  I was awful to live with, a sackful of neuroses, he stuck by me with good grace and humour.  We had hi jinks and stupid conversations until 4am.  Knowing Lu was wonderful.  And frustrating and confusing, because she was human and we were young when we first met and were awful to each other and wonderful to each other as kids are.  And she was heading into adulthood the same way I was - forwards and backwards and reluctantly and willingly - which I suppose is why it's still so fundamentally perplexing why she decided to bow out early.

One song.  Two people.  Two huge sets of emotions.

 You know that sensation of having a word or name or fact on the tip of your tongue?  And it's so acute that you really can feel it on the tip of your tongue?  Well I get that with sense memories.  I touch or smell something and I get tip-of-the-tongue syndrome and it drives me nuts - for days.  Only unlike with words and phrases I can't google what I can remember to relieve the frustration, I just have to keep revisiting the smell or texture or single note and see if I can finally ease my mind into recalling the associated memory.

I got a new mattress on Tuesday.  My Mum has been threatening to surprise me with a new one for over a year now and stubborn, slothful stig that I am, I have maintained I was happy with my knackered, misshapen, budget mattress - and I was.  The last few weeks I've been having more back aches and less sleep so I finally conceded and gratefully accepted my Mum's offer to buy me a new mattress (they are surprisingly expensive - who knew?) However, since it arrived on Tuesday the satisfaction of laying down on a firm but forgiving new mattress has been gradually giving way to a nagging sensation of familiarity.  

Then questions.  Every moment of ever unoccupied thought was given over to the resolution to my unsolvable mystery; when and where had I become acquainted with a mattress like this before?  Where have I slept for long enough to imprint on my muscles the impact of a certain combination of springs and foam?

Finally, as I climbed (and I do mean climbed, the new mattress is twice as deep as the old one - I mean, good grief! I keep thinking of the illustrations of the Princess and the Pea in story books I read as a child) into bed tonight it struck me like a thunderbolt - as these tip-of-the-tongue memories so commonly do - and I remembered where I remembered a mattress like this from.

I wish I hadn't.

Encapsulated in the moment of relief and release at realising where the familiarity came from was bittersweet recollection.  The climax of remembrance is tainted with all the moments connected to that other mattress - a person, a place - a life - that is behind me.  But here it is - in every nerve and muscle - the memory, and the memory trigger, of something long past.

Let go, body, just let it drift out of my muscles.  Let the touch, the smell, the softness, the calm, the sensations of that time be put away and when I find those textures and tastes again, let them be new to me.  Let me sense the world again, afresh.

In 2003 my English A Level class went to Birmingham to hear a day of lectures on Shakespeare. We arrived into Birmingham early, just as the shops were opening. It was a grey and dreary day, we scuttled through the town centre from Birmingham New Street Station, following our teacher who didn't really like students and appeared to be trying to get away from us rather than lead the way.

A dreary start gave way to an unseasonably warm spring day, I recall I was only wearing a t shirt during the lecture itself. Unfortunately that's the only positive the inauspicious start threw up. The lectures were terribly dull and we were, by a country mile, the 'rough' kids - not in uniform (we didn't have one) and lounging about on the lecture hall seats - who got disapproving from the other schools' representatives. Most of our party, including the teacher, fell asleep during the day and we ducked out at the earliest possible opportunity.

Our teacher told us we had 45 mins before the train and to meet at the station, then she disappeared at top speed. Slowly we all dispersed, not out of a desire to stay together, but for want of knowing where to go. I split off with a friend, Lux, and we ambled around the shopping centre. Being 18 we gravitated to a large HMV and split up. I fished out a copy of Generation Terrorists by Manic Street Preachers, it was priced at £17.99* and after some debate with myself, I decided to go for it.

At this point I owned Forever Delayed (bought in Grantham on a rainy Sunday afternoon, with S, from a now defunct record shop), The Holy Bible (from now closed HMV Listergate, Nottingham - Saturday afternoon) and Gold Against the Soul (also from now closed HMV Listergate, Nottingham, Saturday afternoon. Listened to it in car on way home, got Life Becoming a Landslide stuck in my head for 2 weeks, my Mum told my brother I was listening to 'suicide music' as a result of me singing it semi-constantly) and nothing else by the Manics. The logical next choice should have been Everything Must Go (from Amazon, no idea when) but there I was, in HMV in Birmingham, one peculiarly out-of-place afternoon, holding Generation Terrorists.  I was wearing a pale blue golddigga zip up jacket, jeans and Vans trainers.

I paid, rejoined Lux and we went to MacDonalds to pass the time before the train. Gazing out the window at the passers by, I don't recall us talking much, companionable silence I think they call it.

Once on the train I sat against the window on a table seat, travelling backwards. This is back when Central trains ran the line so the carriage was a gaudy shade of green. I put the new CD in my Panasonic 40 second anti-shock portable CD player, sat back, turned my eyes to the window, and listened.

I couldn't believe this was the same band who produced the mature The Holy Bible and the polished Gold Against the Soul. I poured over the lyrics in the insert booklet as I had done with the other studio albums but my eyes widened as I tried to distinguish details in the collage of black and white photos in the centre. It was loud and stupid and glorious and joyful.

The album - if you skip the second Repeat (Repeat UK), as I did, thinking it was a duplicate track - lasts exactly the same time as the train journey from Birmingham to our destination; Melton Mowbray



When I was packing up my posessions in Brighton I tried to find Generation Terrorists - nothing helps packing like Motorcycle Emptiness - and couldn't, I had the box yes, but not the disc . With difficulty, I managed to convince myself it'd 'turn up' when I unpacked. It did not.

What to do? Another disc from Amazon or the like would not be the one I reverently placed in my CD player that day.  Besides, what would I do with the case? The one which had first caught my eye and convinced me to buy it? Take the disc out of the new box, place in old box and discard? That seems like cross contamination! It was quite the conundrum.

Fate, however, was smiling on me.  It sent me to Birmingham on a course.  A dull course at that.  Only a month or two ahead of the original purchase anniversary I found myself standing in front of the very same HMV, some 40 minutes before my train to Melton Mowbray departed, after an unrewarding day's study.  

I took the stairs to the fourth floor 2 at a time and rummaged until I found it - Manic Street Preachers: Generation Terrorists. Lyrics: Nick and Richey, Music: Sean and James.  This time it was a snip at £7.  Glowing with pleasure I clutched it and found myself, for the first time in many years, browsing real live CDs, rather than pictures of them online.  

In due time I paid and departed for my train where I pulled off the wrapping and opened the booklet.  In lieu of a CD player I turned on my iPod and navigated to the appropriate album.  

To my surprise, I enjoyed listening to Generation Terrorists on yesterday's train journey homeward in a way I haven't done since that first time in 2003.  It sounded fresh.  And I actually listened to it - something I rarely manage to do these days, particularly with albums I know inside out.

When the train arrived into Melton I decided to listen to the album again in my car on the drive home.  But it was the same old Generation Terrorists I've come to ignore over the years.  Somehow, the spell was broken the moment I got off that train.



It has made me reflect on how I buy music.  I categorically do not buy album downloads because I would rather have the cd and manually make it digital but I think I'm still missing something by buying those cds online. I can tell you where every single CD I bought in person came from and usually the time of year and where my first listen was.  Every single one.  I'd struggle to tell you when I received the ones I bought online, much less where and how that first listen sounded.

Music has always been more than the sum of it's parts for me, I just never realised how key one of those parts was in creating something more.  Consider my new years resolutions amended.


* This in a time where the average cd price was around £12, so it was still expensive.

Mum: "The miner's strike bought your pram, crib, clothes, toys..."
Me: "what?"
Mum: "Dad [a policeman at the time] was doing loads of overtime so we got loads of extra money"
Dad: "Yeah! We even called Arthur Scargill 'Uncle Arthur'"
Me: "These are not the socialist roots I dreamt of!"

 Writing Prompt for Tuesday, June 1, 2010
When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I couldn't decide between two careers.  For years - until I was about 12 and discovered I wasn't great at maths - I wanted to be either a vet or an astronaut.

A vet for the very simple. and largely uninteresting reason that I liked animals.  The astronaut ambition has more interesting motivations...

Some of my earliest memories are laying in bed waiting to go to sleep and I would sing to myself.  All the songs I sang would be about the stars, or the moon, or the sun.  Somehow I just arrived in the world with an innate wonder at the celestial display.

My Dad taught me to adore and respect Nature.  I think, deep down, he's a Romantic in the most absolute sense, he understands the Sublime in a way few Romantic writers could ever manage to express.  In the appreciation and awe of Nature comes a sense of the absolute wonder at the fact of our planet.

My Dad also assured me that there were and are aliens out there.  It sounds laughable but my Dad is not prone to flights of fancy, he rarely if ever reads fiction and is a salt-of-the-earth type.  But one night, in the early 80's, when he was still a policeman he was on a night patrol with a fellow officer and they were in a stretch of open ground.  Suddenly a bright light shot to earth and hovered a few feet above the ground.  It was so bright my Dad struggled to look directly at it.  He tried to approach but as he got close enough to really *see* what he was looking at the light shot back up in the air, hovered overhead for a few seconds and then jetted into the atmosphere.

He still has a copy of the official report he filed after this inexplicable event.  It was duly investigated - which is to say the RAF and Air Traffic Control were contacted and requested to supply any pertinent information which might explain the spectacle.  There was no explanation available.  My Dad is, to this day, convinced of what he saw.  

As a kid this made a dramatic impact upon me.  My imaginative world exploded.  I had no doubt that aliens existed; that every space expedition brought us a little closer to a bigger universe.  I used to ask my parents exactly how many years it would be before we could live on the moon.  I played endlessly with my lego space-base set and sang David Bowie's Space Oddity as I played; just the first verse and chorus, over and over again.

Of course, my absolute faith in my Dad's judgement waned, as it is want to do as we mature.  Indeed it was around the same time I came to the conclusion that there was no God and that Christianity was well intentioned twaddle that I also concluded my Dad was not lying in as much as he believed what he saw, but that he was mistaken - it was not irrefutably alien life, there were as many terrestrial explanations as extra.  And then, then I stopped wanting to be an astronaut.
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...more or less.

What came with maturity, with disentangling my personality from my parents as children do as they grow up, was fear.  Awareness of the hugeness of earth, the fragility of life, my own mortality.  And space ceased to be a gap waiting to be filled and took on a new role as a hostile....it is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.  Oh shit, hang on, I just turned into Bones....but you get the idea.

The power of stars, the beauty of our Earth, my continuing astonishment at the many and various ways the natural landscape can alter in a second through the combined forced of our atmosphere and the barely known powers beyond....all these things have not yet lost their power over me.

One of the things I miss the most about living in a city is losing the stars.  In the country the sky is full, every night.  One of the most remarkable sights I ever saw were the stars in the Southern Hemisphere one night, in Australia, from the deck of a tall ship in the Whitsundays.  I will never forget falling asleep to that spectacular display.

And somewhere in there is the reason I'm not an astronaut.  I think.

I really have missed you.

And tonight was brilliant.

I realised so much about us both, stuff that should have been obvious years ago, but perhaps it is only now that I am ready to see it.

I'm not in love with you any more.  And I'm not in love with her any more either.  Isn't that huge? Isn't that glorious?

For a while I thought my broken heart would always mean I was still in love with her.  But somehow, tonight, a little bit of me that was reflected back at me as I sat talking to you was the bit that showed me the truth;  no love.

I can't wait to see you again in February.  I'm sorry we've lost so much time over the past few years - I think a lot of it came from how she changed me; but I know there was a girl changing you too.  We've both arrived somewhere better.  I'm glad that we are in each others future.

You're the keeper of half my memories.  I forget how much I forget.  Then you tell someone a story about something I did, or something we did together and the little portraits you paint release memories I didn't know I had.  Sometimes the story is as new to me as the person you are telling it to - I wish my memory was better, I really do, but it is such a relief to know that you, and a few other people, are keeping close guardianship of my youthful excesses, my triumphs and the many and various ways in which we got to this point.