It's been a while

It’s been more than two months since my last entry. This was due to a chain reaction of circumstances – a heavy period at work, followed by a possibly-not-unconnected bout of illness, followed by another heavy period at work trying to catch up following sick-leave, and culminating with a life-changing event, the anticipation of which I have touched upon in previous entries. But I am NOT ready to tackle that in a blog yet.

I started this blog in a slightly less hectic season work-wise, and was quite surprised at myself for managing nearly two months’ worth of regular entries. Then I lost momentum, and was not even sure whether I would pick it up again – there novelty of blogging, especially when one remains entirely unread, wears thin after a while.

One thing a period of illness allows me, is the leisure time to read. As I’ve mentioned before, I am a keen reader, and have real difficulties putting a fiction book aside once started. Thus I can rarely allow myself the luxury, except on long journeys by public transport (alone, not with a toddler) or when sufficiently ill to lack the energy to do pretty much anything else. Thus recent acute bronchitis meant I could indulge in a fair few novels (it was not a long illness, but I can read pretty fast). I would like to share a few thoughts about the most thought-provoking of these books, and the reflections they induced concerning the subject of this blog. Of course my indulgent meanderings cannot do justice to the power and skill of these novels (I can only say that you would be much better spending your time reading these books than some inane online blog).

I read The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, telling the story of four generations of a Chilean landowning family, encompassing issues of poverty, class conflict, political unrest and fascist oppression, with a poetic dose of spirituality and the supernatural. I read Inés of My Soul, also by Isabel Allende, about the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of Chile and the horrendous suffering and bloodshed involved on both sides. I read The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, which tells the interweaving stories of several characters set in London during, and immediately following, World War 2.

These books are cracking good yarns, with amazing plots and effective prose. All these books include vivid and moving depictions of shocking cruelty and suffering inflicted by humans on other humans. They also tell stories of survival, of the strength and resilience of which humans are capable in situations of immense difficulty and suffering. All these books are fiction, and yet draw on historical events so closely, that the experiences described clearly reflect real experiences lived by people of those places and times.

This reading experience once more brought home to me the abstract and indulgent nature of the concerns that supposedly drive this blog. If death is potentially around every immediate corner, and every day is a fight for survival – as it must have been for many during the Blitz, during times of military persecution and fascist rule, during the Spanish conquest and all other episodes of aggressive colonialism – then a person has no space to fret about the potential fate of the entire human race and planet Earth. Generalised ecological and economic worries are luxuries afforded only to those who are not battling significant, immediate personal hardship.

I also have the luxury of wondering if/when the collapse of the current economic and ecological systems will bring about human suffering of the immediate, intense nature of some of the scenarios depicted in these books. It may well already being doing so in ways of which I am shamefully ignorant.

Makes you realise how lucky you are.

New tram tune

I’ve got a new tram-to-office tune! 

As I explained in Too much music, I’m a terrible creature of habit on whom 16 GB of iPod space is completely wasted, as I usually switch to one of two tunes for the walking part of my commute. Well, all that changed this morning.

For once, I hadn’t even wired up for the tram journey, as I had a gripping novel to finish. I love reading – I could make that the subject of an entry, or even an entire blog, one day – but it’s rare that I allow myself fiction on the tram, as I’m such a plot junkie that it is too painful to put the book aside and return to the real world on arrival. As it happened, the end of today’s read was something of a disappointment, as I was able to discover (with serendipitous timing, due partly to a tramway technical glitch) just one stop before the end of my journey. I don’t know what made me get the iPod out for only the less-than-five-minute tram-to-office trot, and even less what made me need to listen to a different song.

This time I will reveal what the song is, in the hope of introducing the genius of Oysterband to people who have not yet had the opportunity. My family discovered this band several years ago, but for some reason I had only really got into one album, Here I Stand. Recently I pushed myself to expand my repertoire, and discovered the album The Shouting End of Life, and in particular latched on to the song ‘Everywhere I Go’.

I like Oysterband for their variety – their lyrical love songs, rollicking dance tunes, and political, anti-establishment rants. ‘Everywhere I Go’ falls into the latter category; it is about, as I understand it, the confusion and contradictions of the world we live in, and how we are manipulated by the powers-that-be. The chorus is as follows:*

‘Everywhere I go I see what’s going on

And the more I see, the less I know.’

Here is my favourite line:

‘And the food we eat won’t go bad

But the cows are mad and the chickens glow

They want to tell you this, they want to sell you that

Just hold your hat when the black wind blows’

This song has an invigorating, driving rhythm and pulsating cello line, which along with its angry lyrics are fantastically energising, perfect for my morning commute. The only problem, if it can be called a problem, is that it is followed by a beautiful ballad called ‘Put Out the Lights’. This song can make me cry, for two reasons: 1) its combination of poignant lyrics and harmonic progressions mysteriously provoke certain biochemical reactions within my organism; 2) Someone very close to me (previously mentioned in my Waiting for the end and Christmas entries) suggested this song as a possible funeral choice. This has resulted in me having to hide tears on the tram on more than one occasion, but then this is not the only song (or stimulus) to have this effect. Luckily, repeated exposure is making me less sensitive to its effects (a little like the treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder perhaps).

This is also helped by the fact that it is followed, two tracks later, by one of the funniest songs I’ve ever heard: ‘Don’t Slit Your Wrists for Me’. Set to a rollicking, Celtic-like dance tune, it is about a girl with ‘…rings on her fingers and a bone stuck through her nose … wearing studs in places where the gardener never goes…’ rejecting the advances of a hormonal young man:

‘And I wouldn’t say I couldn’t be a lover

Not if there was nothing else to be

But if love is what you’re dying to discover, darling

Don’t slit your wrists for me’

This song has had me grinning to myself, or even giggling out loud on the tram. By the time my iPod has fed me these few tracks, my fellow commuters must be wondering if I’m really safe to be let out on my own in public. The joys of personal, portable music . . .

* All lyrics copyright the Oysterband, quoted without permission but with evident admiration and appreciation. I am fully aware of the dodgy ground of quoting song lyrics by authors still-living or not sufficiently dead, and am taking the risk as I think it is blindingly obvious that my doing so cannot possibly have a negative effect on the respective musicians' income or reputation, and is clearly not for personal gain. To paraphrase the approach of the great political musicologist Philip Tagg: so sue me.

Happy New Year

Like Christmas, the end of the year and all the pomp and circumstance that goes with it is too much for me to tackle in a blog entry. I suppose I could trot out some really obvious things, concerning clichéd, and doomed New Year resolutions, or my history of disappointing New Year celebrations. Even by my own standards it is not really worth the waste of blogosphere space or electricity.

I will just share one thing that I was lucky enough to receive for Christmas, and that I am hoping will greatly help in my approach to 2013, if I let it. One of my most precious Christmas gifts, beautifully handmade and from someone who knows me very well, came inscribed with the following quotation.

“Life is not about sheltering from the storm. It's about learning to dance in the rain.”

The best I have done with Google's help is find various versions of this phrase, attributed to various authors. I won’t spoil it by trying to add anything further.

Love you sis.