The Fevered Brain

I have spent the last four days in bed with a virus.  Now that the initial delirium has passed, I am bed-bound with a body that refuses to work properly and my world has shrunk to this.

After staring at a blank wall for forty minutes, spot thermometer and interestedly take temperature; feel sense of achievement that temperature is satisfyingly high and proceed to take temperature approximately every ten minutes for the next four days.

Gaze vacantly at the mirror on the wall, notice the way the light catches the smears all over the lower half and marvel at the hitherto unnoticed beauty therein.

Count the number of tiles visible on next door's roof from current prone position and decide the glorious profusion of lichen is the exact colour of the sofa cushions.

Catch sight of self in mirror and pleased to see that face has pallor of old porridge and that eyes are managing to look both bulbous and sunken.
Look in  mirror again- unsettled to realise that all the above still true and wonder if face will ever recover.

Google facial re-surfacing.
Google camouflage make-up techniques
Google revolutionary new face lift
Google Dogs Dressed As Superheroes
Drop phone.

Discover that if you look out of the lower left hand corner of the window and squint, it reminds you of the view from your South London classroom, circa 1982.

Perfect playing the William Tell Overture on front teeth with fingernails.

With pounding head and leaden limbs, start planning own funeral. Struggle to decide on whether to make funeral upbeat, eccentric affair - closing music choice: "Land of Make Believe" by Bucks Fizz -or devastatingly moving send-off featuring Barber's Adagio for Strings.
Wonder whether Mozart's Requiem might, in fact, be more fitting. Listen to the Lachrymosa and dissolve into floods of tears.

Check temperature again.

Embark upon in depth research (i.e.Google) to find link between flu symptoms and cancer/ebola/MRSA/tuberculosis/polio etc, etc.

Stagger slowly and resentfully to bathroom, rest head on basin; write mental note to clean grout when fully recovered. Make monumental effort to stand on scales: woozily pleased to discover that have lost four pounds. Crawl back to bed.

Take temperature again.

Decide this is definitely a good opportunity to try reading past the third page of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, but instead fall abruptly asleep with no warning, cheek laid tenderly on half-eaten piece of toast.

See you on the other side.

Mists and mellow fruitfulness

The first day of October and it was suitably misty this morning; we are told that we have just said goodbye to the driest September the UK has seen since records began and one of the warmest.  And jolly nice it was too, although it played havoc with my wardrobe decisions: every day I'd find myself surreptitiously blotting the perspiration from my attractively over-heated face as I realised that it really wasn't the correct weather for a sheepskin lined parka on the school run, no matter how chilly it had been at quarter to seven that morning.  Well, I wouldn't want to risk being cold.
So I've been waiting for autumn to kick in; I love autumn, I love the emotion inherent in it, the wistfulness and the unavoidable sense of time passing.  I love that something as abstract as a season can fill you with yearning and an inexplicable longing.  That's why songwriters write about it: "Autumn Leaves",  "Autumn in New York" (Frank Sinatra sings it in sublime fashion here) " Early Autumn" and even Tom Waits' surreal sounding "November".
I wrote last year about my tendency to melancholy around Christmas- well, it begins to dawn upon me that maybe it's not just Christmas that makes me over-emotional, maybe I'm just like that all the time. And maybe I listen to the wrong sort of music if I want to be feeling cheery.....

But if I think about it for a minute, all the seasons are imbued with feeling (in my head, at least): winter is dour and sparks a stark stoicism- keep your head down and power through the bleak days, your eyes watering in a wind that is steel cold against your cheek and chills your soul. Dour indeed.  Spring as everybody knows, is associated with hope and beginnings, a freshness and yes, a cheeriness - no melancholy here, thank you very much; summer is joyous, wanton; drowsy and a little bit louche. Summer is sexy and makes you feel as if life can be lived like a Fellini film; and as summer comes to an end we start to feel the slow encroaching sadness and looming nostalgia of autumn, rolling lazily towards us as a low-lying mist until we find ourselves enveloped in its damp mournfulness.  Gazing back at the year with a thousand yard stare, we are unable as yet to tear our gaze away, unwilling to relinquish it, to surrender it to memory.
And then, at last, as it turns colder and the colour recedes, we can turn and look purposefully towards the coming festivities.


(addendum: to counteract any melancholy I may have sparked, I recommend a quick blast of this.
Earth, Wind and Fire. Now, go forth and dance into autumn.)

The Soundtrack to my Life

Since I was little I've wanted to live in a film. A film, either black and white or glorious technicolor, possibly musical, possibly not and I would be a very glamorous person, brittle but vulnerable, probably slightly tortured. Nothing too awful: mild heartbreak maybe, unrequited love, maybe getting over the death of a faithful pet. A horse. Anyway, I would obviously be immaculately dressed at all times and have a good line in snappy one-liners delivered in a wry drawl.
The point I'm getting round to is that in this film-that-is-my-life type thing there will clearly have to be a soundtrack.  I picked my soundtrack early on in my life and it remains something I listen to when I am in a nostalgic or romantic mood; then I can imagine that my mundane life is slightly more soft focus than it is. This is my soundtrack:

It's wonderful; the title says everything you need to know.  Jackie Gleason's romantic string arrangements of beautiful songs with the sublime sound of Bobby Hackett's trumpet soaring overhead.  It's music to fall in love to, music to fill your head while you gaze into the eyes of a new lover.   And look at that cover! That's me there, drinking a stiff martini and looking wistful - any minute now a handsome stranger is going to rock up and offer me a cigarette from a silver case, light it for me, then after saying something devastating he'll whisk me off to........ Actually I don't know where- I haven't quite worked that bit out.  I expect it will involve dancing and cocktails and end with a diaphanous negligée robe type thing and the kind of slippers that have heels and feathers. 

Anyway, listening to this album makes my whole life more glamorous. Even when I'm dusting, or picking up bits of Lego from under the sofa. And that's saying something. 

The Great Vintage Explosion.

Nostalgia: it's not what it used to be. I'll give you a minute for the paroxysms of mirth to subside....... But I want to consider this explosion of interest in all things "vintage". I suppose I am looked upon as a vintage type; after all, I have spent all my adult life singing songs from past eras, predominantly those from between the wars and it is precisely that era which seems to have captured the mass imagination. But why?
  I'm a bit half hearted about the vintage thing these days.  I always liked to wear a flower in my hair: it was pretty and if you ignored the flies and the need to carry a small bottle of baby bio in your handbag, it was a nice look and chimed with my love of the music of the pre-war era, but to be honest, I don't do that as much any more. Mainly because every girl from the age of 12 now wears a floral tea dress and a flower in her hair and a forty year old woman should not be wearing what the youth are wearing, even if she was doing it first.  And that's my first thought: it's a ridiculous one, but I have this childish urge to stamp my foot and berate them (the youth) for nicking my thing. I want to inform them that they can't cherry pick bits of a vintage look without research, goddammit. You can't just wander around wearing winged eyeliner and red lipstick without permission, there must be some sort of form you have to fill in, a questionnaire somewhere that requires you to name all the Andrews Sisters and then list the composers and lyricists of all the most popular "vintage" songs without loudly stating that you love anything by Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra. And the first person to mention Robbie Williams and his single handed revival of Big Band gets a kick in the shins.

And Kirstie Allsopp's Vintage Hand-knitted, Patchwork domesticity isn't helping either- now every man and his dog is up-cycling the kitchen cabinets and sending the price of Ridgeway's Homemaker plates through the roof. It's all Cath Kidston bin liners and twee cushions with appliqué felt ration books. They'll be roasting the rack of lamb on a Bakelite spit next.

Or there's the other, hipster type who grows a handlebar moustache and rides a penny farthing, and who likes to play the ukulele and drink real ale (you should need a permit and a safety net for that kind of thing).... But this is a different triumph of style over substance, this is a feigned earnestness, a knowledge of an era that on the surface looks complete and all-encompassing, but is in fact kind of calculated.  It's not actually a deep-seated, true and passionate love of Al Bowlly, it's a pose, a cursory sweep of something you have come across and assimilated into your carefully constructed mantle of quirky chap who, gosh, looks really VERY INTERESTING.

I am veering into dodgy territory here, running the risk of becoming the other extreme: the vintage snob, who does genuinely love their chosen era; uses powdered milk in their tea -or whatever it is they do- and forms an impenetrable clique, where if you don't have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the background to Duke Ellington and the Paul Gonsalves tenor solo at the 1956 Newport Jazz festival, then you WILL be sneered at and JUDGED.

I expect this has all come to the front of my mind because tomorrow I shall be singing at the Twinwood Festival, which is a veritable smorgasbord of everything vintage and retro and is great fun actually. I am doing the majority of vintage lovers a huge disservice; most of them are charming, interesting and truly dedicated people who have helped keep me in work for twenty years and I am just being grumpy.
I think that is because I have realised that it is very difficult to draw a decent flick with one's liquid liner when you have crows feet and your eyelids have dropped.
So I'll shut up now.

'Tis the season to be mournful

I function differently in December. So far today I have cried at a children's nativity ON DAYTIME TV, wept on 3 separate occasions at adverts and I just broke down completely, kneeling on the kitchen floor listening to the epically brilliant White Wine in the Sun by Tim Minchin. As I say: tough month, December.
I think all this wailing and snot is a result of a couple of things; firstly, nine years ago my Dad died, 8 weeks after finding out -at Christmas- that he had cancer. He didn't tell us till after Christmas. He was a bit weepy that holiday; maybe that, and the fact that he'd lost the use of one arm should have been a bit of a giveaway, but our family is famed for its outstanding ability to gaze interestedly at the ceiling, whistling nonchalantly and ignoring any elephants that may have sidled into the room. So maybe I keep experiencing tiny moments of grief for Christmases past, before people started dying all over the place.
Secondly, I have children. Anyone who has children will confirm that from the very moment they spring forth into the world, you, as parent become instantly susceptible to all adverts for any kind of charity and are unable to watch the news without woefully shaking your head and wondering aloud why you have brought a child into such a Heartless World and what will become of us all? When I was blessed with children I became an unlovely blend of vacuity, angst and irritability, mitigated by occasional moments of (maudlin) joy. And gin.
As I write this a lone boy soprano is singing Once in Royal David's City (on the radio- I don't keep a choirboy to hand in the corner of the room) and I am once again perilously close to flinging myself on the sofa and soaking the cushions with my tears. If I hear a brass band playing Christmas carols, no matter how iffy the tuning I am sent into paroxysms of weeping; I had a very embarrassing episode listening to the Salvation Army band outside BHS once.
But it's not just Christmas, although that does to seem to have a particular effect- it seems to be any communal celebration- watching Morris dancers with my children on May Day, church services; views of the countryside as seen from a train window; watching strangers just enjoying life: they all have the capacity to set me off.

So I have decided to see this rather exasperating phenomenon as a strength. A super power. After all, nobody wants to sit next to the woman weeping quietly on the train, overcome by the beauty of the TREES. Unpleasant confrontation with rude shop assistant? Just watch the confounded look on their face as I burst into noisy sobs. Yes, alright, maybe it doesn't achieve anything exactly, but as an avoidance tactic, it's pretty unbeatable. You could possibly embellish it by fainting in an obvious manner, but that might hurt and anyway I'm straying from the point.

The point is, I cry a lot these days so I shall just make sure that a) I have a
large supply of tissues about my person at all times and 2) that I am wearing a decent waterproof mascara, in order to avoid that Whatever Happened to Baby Jane look that I seem to have unwittingly adopted. I've got a suspicion that it's only going to get worse, so I might as well wallow in it. I'm off to watch E.T. with a large gin; Happy Christmas