Singing and Singing

We were stir-crazy last night and Offsprog One suggested a spot of karaoke. We bellowed our way through Jolene (what great verse lyrics! I'd never realised what poetry they are), I'm Just a Teenage Dirtbag, For Once In My Life and Free (by Destiny's Child: so many words!). And more. It was both weird and exhilarating at the same time.

Then today when I was on my way to work today and travelling through Camden Town to change trains, a young man was singing in the street with his guitar. His voice was mega-amplified. It seemed like he was staking out his territory with sound, which was impossible to escape from. Heartless, soulless Brit-School melisma forced its way into the cracks of my consciousness, relentless in its volume: you could hear him streets away. 

I love hearing buskers singing with their natural voices into the air around them, mingling their tunes with the sounds of passing transport and the pavement conversations of city-dwellers. I understand how a performer might not want to be drowned out by these things. But my thoughts were so drowned out by his noisemaking, that I felt like bribing him to turn his amplifier down.

Then I worried about the thin walls at home. Did we invade the neighbour's Sunday evening meditations with our jolly caterwauling? The boundaries between noise and music are indistinct and tenuous. Maybe we should learn to sing in whispers. Whisper-singing: there's a thing.

Magwa the Hero Rat

Magwa (no longer with us) used to sniff out land mines.

From Sunday Drawing Club.

Sunday Service

I am unexpectedly at home a lot at the moment, thinking; there is something therapeutic about this, frustrating though it sometimes feels. I can feel my brain stretching, measuring, comparing, mulling...

Early this morning in a bout of insomnia, I thought about my (our) parents. This was simulated by my friend Laura from over the Atlantic Ocean sending photographs she'd found while tidying up her Dad's belongings after he passed away a few weeks ago. There were some I'd never seen and I started thinking about her parents and my own, who had very similar levels of contentment.

Being at home with the news being piped relentlessly into the house through a stream of channels- it literally feels that it's leaking bad news through every crack in a floorboard and badly-fitting door- makes you aware of just how angry people are.

A lot of this is justified, but it's stirred up by people who are playing the angry people's feelings as a sport. They have the money to fund campaigns that disrupt society because when society is disrupted, very rich people get richer. All that anger energy is basically being farmed, isn't it? Look at who is making money during the pandemic, and who is suffering.

I watch people I know become furious and blame anything they can lay their hands and eyes on- refugees, men, women, teenagers, people from Black and Asian communities, Germans and Austrians (something to so with a war in the LAST CENTURY, sorry for angry capitals), people poorer than them (benefits, you know), Jewish people, people from the gay and lesbian and + communities, disabled people (there is a horrible eugenics thread going alongside the 'learning to live with Covid' narrative that has led to me feeling ashamed of some of the people that I know), intellectuals, people who grow high hedges outside their houses (I know!), people whom they think have had better luck in their lives, wealthy Southerners. You name it, there's blame to be had, and anger to be laid at a doorstep.

Through all this, I have come to realise that my far-from-perfect parents were contented. They didn't complain about each other. They had enough time to help other people (a lot). They were really involved in politics in a very principled way, and acted accordingly rather than telling people what they should be doing all the time. They didn't need to shout from the rooftops, and they taught us by example to accept people who were different to us, and to try to understand them.

At the moment, this is quite a wearying approach. I have always needed a lot of peace, quiet and solitude to process living in a world with so many opinions and feelings cascading down upon my head. I suppose I have music as an outlet: I can be quite forthright and keep to certain principles. More on that another time. I need a cup of tea.

The Fat Hedges Of Barnet

Thought you could walk on the pavement? Think again! The good citizens of Barnet trim their hedges carefully so that they take up half the pavement, just in case pedestrians thought they could walk two abreast. There are handy apertures in the hedges so the house-owners can scuttle out to their 4x4s to go to the gym, but apart from that, it's Keep Out, Strangers! Box, Privet, Cotoneaster, Bay, Rhododendron: it's a unanimous 'NO'. 

Keep Out! Go to a place far from here if you want to walk around the streets! 

Alarm!

Yesterday I was reading a book, sitting in a chair in pool of light. I felt a sharp and very unpleasant pain on the skin of my stomach. Shocked, my hand flew to the painful spot, and I felt a crack. What was happening? Had I acquired some vile pustule since the morning?

I'd been concentrating heavily on the book; in my head I'd been in Glasgow with the protagonists, dreading the next move that was surely going to land them in Big Trouble.

But this was terrible! I stood up and walked through to the bathroom to investigate. 

I fumbled with my jumper. Then I stopped in my tracks. What a fool. I'd been eating potato crisps and obviously one had dropped down inside my clothes and had sharply stabbed me as it cracked in half.

This is what it feels like to have a built-in 'fool factor' that overshadows anything noble or clever that I might ever achieve in my life.

The Sweet Hymn

After Sunday School, the church elder asked me to stay on for a few minutes. McMum and McDad were hovering around having tea or something.

He had a small, grey, portable reel-to-reel tape recorder and a big microphone. My job was to stand there and sing a sweet hymn acapella for him to record. I did what I was told. I was a good girl.

As I sang, he held the microphone pointed towards me with a trembling hand. He seemed tall and portly in his dark banker's jacket and pinstriped trousers, and I was small and skinny. He had a thick bushy grey-blonde moustache above full juicy lips. I did not know where to look, and eventually I looked into his eyes, behind his gold rimmed spectacles. They were watering with a sort of yearning that I did not understand. A smile trickled about his mouth.

Afterwards he packed away the little tape recorder and said 'Thank you' and went off.

I knew something was wrong, and I had given him my voice to store away and listen to, but I had been powerless to refuse.

Years later at my sister's wedding in Edinburgh I saw him again, still clad in his black banker's jacket and pinstriped trousers. Everyone had left the church and made their way to the hotel where the reception was being held. I realised that he must have been quite young back then, even though he had seemed old to me. A very long, thick white hair was growing from the very middle of the bridge of his nose: just one.

Microphone Stands

Microphone stands are second only to deckchairs in the annoyingness charts. Actually no- perhaps third, with music stands far out there in front of both of them.

But microphone stands- they require superhuman strength to tighten the components, otherwise they very, very slowly start to sag with that kind of ''f*ck you' look in their eyes than only a toddler deliberately peeing on the floor gives you. Even the lightest-weight microphone is too heavy for their delicate constitution. Like a giraffe's neck they gently bow over, usually when you're halfway through a really good vocal take that you're never going to be able to replicate. Perish the thought that you might try to engage the beast with a heavier-duty microphone! Microphone stand says 'NO!'. With a swooping motion, the stand collapses in rapid refusal.

Ok. So maybe you manage to balance everything well enough to get the damn thing to hold the microphone for just that few tantalising minutes that you need to record the song. Triumph! You think you've beaten the bastard!

Until the next time you try to erect the stand. It's decided that the screw threads have had enough. There's no way any part of it is going to hold anything up now. No, not after the way you made it work so hard the last time! No way! You'll have to buy a brand new microphone stand!

Same thing again. Microphone stands are second only to deckchairs in the.... (ad infinitum)

Trees Twist And Shout

Very slowly over decades and eventually centuries, trees dance. We can't catch them at it, because we move at the pace of a wasp's wings as far as trees are concerned. Our long days and weeks last milliseconds of treetime: we can't register their playfulness, not matter how slowly we move. Our lives are mere blurs as the trees dance languidly and majestically, twisting and shouting in their own time, throwing their twigs and branches to the heavens with joy. 

Reading Rubbish

During the pandemic, and indeed before all that, I have steadily read my way through the entire crime and thriller shelves of the local charity shops. Good ones, bad ones and mediocre ones; the books with pretentious quotations at the beginnings of sections that try in vain to rescue floundering prose; the books aimed at men, with feeble and vacuous female characters; the books aimed at women, with awful caricatured male leads.

I rarely abandon a book. It seems churlish after all the effort that a write has expended on plotting, writing and delivering, but I have learned to avoid certain writers. No Lynda la Plante, for instance: she is a Daily Mail Tory and her views are obnoxious, even filtered through made-up stories. There is another female writer whose name escapes me, who seems to write with a pen dipped in pure spite and who actually makes you feel grubby while you're reading her work.

There are writers who you wish could write twice as fast, although you know their books wouldn't be so carefully constructed if they did: Val McDairmid, Tara French, Ian Rankin and Mick Herron, for instance. And John Grisham manages to be educational as well as gripping; I feel as though I've learned a lot about the US political system and the way its entwined in dirty business from his books.

I have a revolving door-system: one in, one out. Or I thought that I did: the pile of 'I'm going to read this again' books seems to get higher every week.

Why am I writing this? I am three quarters of the way through book that is struggling to be interesting. None of the characters are engaging and I don't care what happens. Do I carry on to the end of the book just to experience book-time and a sense of completion, or do I give up and consign it to the 'back to the charity shop' pile? 

I had to get up early for the washing machine repairer (it's fixed now and burbling in the background), and the convalescing resident's not up yet. I haven't the energy for the half-finished album this morning, the coffee is disgusting (it's from year-old pack that turned up last week), and I need a break before starting work, which always spills over into not-work time.

OK, that's it. Finish the rubbish book, finish the coffee and start the day. A plus tard! 

Played by Gideon Coe Last Night

 

Helen and the Horns John Peel Show

https://www.mixcloud.com/karleldridge5/john-peel-thur-22-sept-1983-helen-the-horns-fireworks-in-session-royals-gang-of-4-james-42m/

Thanks to Karl Eldridge for sharing on Twitter

Fadeawayradiate Article on Women in Music

https://www.fadeawayradiate.com/2022/02/are-we-electric-some-thoughts-on-the-lack-women-in-the-music-industry/?fbclid=IwAR2nxYIAQaVLZukcw7JWLn9m7-dbeaiCWdWuT2LZbRPRSSts_pYSo5ZTBQg

Estella Rosa's blog.

Slide Rule

Life at the moment is like a slide rule. Nights are not for sleeping and daytimes have random timetables that don't fit in with what anyone else is doing.

I have been very tired and as a consequence, I'm doing everything really slowly to make sure I don't make any mistakes. I'm still getting stuff wrong but it would probably be worse if I was running at the normal speed.

Oh, I'm so looking forward to being out there gigging again. Like a lot of people, I desperately need fun. I've been finding it in nooks and crannies but I want the full-fat version!

This is the track that I sang on for Willie G, proceeds to the Good Law Project. It's actually Bandcamp Friday too, which I'd completely forgotten. Next time, next time.

https://williegibson.bandcamp.com

The Blues

There has been a lot of difficult stuff going on that is too private to blog about. I decided to do something positive to try to change just a tiny thing to make things better. Something small, relaxing and empowering in the home, the way the TV shows tell you. 

I had an old pale blue bedspread that has always been better than any replacement I might find. It's seen better days but it's big and useful, and refreshing it by re-dyeing it was going to do the trick. I went to the hardware shop and bought two large tubs of royal blue wash'n'dye, crammed the bedspread into the washing machine with them, and sat back waiting for magic to happen. I would start the evening with pale blue worn out bedding, and end it with a vibrant new look! What could possibly go wrong?

After a long time, I peeked into the big dark glass eye of the machine and the bedspread still seemed to be the same colour. There was an odd smell, too, and I realised that the machine was on a 'dry' cycle. Opening the door, I saw a dry, undyed bedspread and a host of baked grains of dye that had clumped together in a hideous mess. The machine had rebelled in the only way it knew how.

The only thing to do was to set it off again and try to reactivate the dye (I thought).

Three hours later, the machine beeped a mournful alarm sound into the kitchen and flashed it's little lights in pain. 

I opened the door and there lay a sodden, streaked bedspread in a soupy mess of blue water. I hauled it out into the sink, flooding the kitchen floor in the process, and tried to run a 'spin' cycle to drain the blue soup from the drum of the machine. It was't going anywhere. 

'Beep! Beep!' it alarmed.

After a rest to recover, I managed to wrestle the bedspread into the back yard, where is is perched threateningly on a  bin bag. Reluctantly, I phoned the washing machine repair family.

It was their answering machine. 'I am sorry, we have been exposed to Covid this week, and will not be able to do any work until further notice'.

AAAAARGH!!!!!!!!

Lecturing Online Again

So there you sit, talking mostly to photographs (are they actually there, listening?), amongst all the home demons that interrupt you despite yourself. It makes you unguarded, and that's not good at all.

Two more weeks of this and then back to the risks of the classroom, unless the virus has got out of hand again by then.