Simply the Best

I have been fascinated since I started writing this blog by how much music is intrinsic in my life – the background to all I do. I recently read an article in which the author described songs as “a constant soundtrack to one’s interior world”. I so agree. They are a source of inspiration and consolation and pure enjoyment. The mystery of a song is how it interacts with memories and experiences and becomes intensely personal. “More than any other form of artistic expression, people claim songs as their own.”[1]

They are tied to actions and feelings and once linked, the ties cannot be undone. Good songs become bad, bad are good just because of what you felt while listening to them. You usually don’t know all the words to your personal anthems, or even perhaps their original meaning. What they evoke for you becomes their meaning.

Remember Tina Turner belting out Simply the Best? That gravelly voice and those legs. I saw her here in Johannesburg and embarrassed my daughter by dancing wildly in public – she was only nine at the time and hadn’t got to the stage of her own revelry.

I call you when I need you

When my heart’s on fire

You come to me, come to me

Wild and wired

What is “wild and wired” anyway? Crazy for love? High? A bit of a reprobate? But that’s not the point. It is for me all about a time when I was working with one of my best friends and the incredible fun we had for nearly 20 years. It’s also about my learning what I was good at and what I wanted to do with my life. I travelled the length and breadth of South Africa working in rural schools. Give me a pin and a map and I doubt if there is a place you’ll find where I can’t tell you the name of a local B&B.

Over those years I really did have simply the best time. Most public schools in South Africa are not for the faint-hearted, especially in deep rural areas. There is much wrong with education here but there is also good to be found everywhere. And definitely humour, even amongst the heartbreak. I have sat in classes in mud huts on top of a hill in the old Transkei with dung-smeared floors and watched as goats wandered in an out, rhythmically chewing the teacher’s notes as she put them down to write on a blackboard propped on a chair. I have walked up the same hills to schools through knee deep mud after rain made the dirt tracks impassable – and loved the looks on the faces of the children when they looked askance at my wiggling bare toes.

I sat through good lessons and bad, heard stories about how schools have been turned around and also terrible excuses about how something couldn’t be done. I have caught dysentery, viral mumps and measles in schools, but have also listened to songs, seen plays, been to prize givings and sports days. I even actually had one class sing to me

You’re the best

Better than all the rest

Better than anyone

Anyone [we’ve] ever met

How could it not be a good time?

[1] Neil McCormick, The Telegraph

Under the boardwalk

My mother was a blue rinse and perm girl. She went once a week to the hairdresser and had her silver grey hair finely tuned to a purple-blue.  She sat under a great hooded drier in small pink curlers until her cap of tight blue curls was ready to be teased and sprayed into a permanent fixture meant to last a week at least. Holidays were hell for her as she had to either find a new hairdresser or wash her own hair.

My father on the other hand had his own anguish to deal with. Leaving the farm meant leaving his cows for more than a week. Would they cope? Who would dip them? What if they became sick or calved in his absence. He couldn’t bear it.

My sister and I were privy to none of this at the time but later came to understand that these were two of the reasons that we only holidayed out of the country once every three years. Three to four weeks of misery for both parents. In between we would take annual week-long breaks within Zimbabwe. All done by car and none without the usual in-car fights and complaints all trips with children are prone to.

But the joy of getting there outshone everything. Every trip had a theme song. It started on the drive to wherever we were going and we sang incessantly along with the radio. Sandie Shaw sang me all the way to the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe. I did so hope that this might, just might, be the time where I would meet the boy of my dreams.

I wonder if one day that, you’ll say that, you care

If you say you love me madly, I’ll gladly, be there

Like a puppet on a string

The saga of The Monkees kept me amused up to the Wankie Game Reserve. First time I’d ever heard of lip-syncing.

Love was out to get me

Now that’s the way it seemed

Disappointment haunted all my dreams

Oh then I saw her face, now I’m a believer

Not a trace of doubt in my mind

I’m in love, I’m a believer

I couldn’t leave her if I tried

Disappointment definitely haunted me although I later discovered they hadn’t lip-synced their singing but ‘play-synced’ their instruments!  Who can tell these days who is actually singing most of the time?!

And then, Under the boardwalk. This has to be the song of seaside holidays

Oh when the sun beats down and burns the tar up on the roof

And your shoes get so hot you wish your tired feet were fire proof

Under the boardwalk, down by the sea, yeah

On a blanket with my baby is where I’ll be

The coconut smell of Tropitone, melting ice creams, red skin and sore shoulders, carrying far too much to the beach, hating carrying it home later, and sand in everything! Isn’t that what holidays are about?

But, Dad never got carried away by the music. He and Otis Redding might have been Sittin’ in the morning sun but [he’d still] be sittin’ when the evening comes, Watching the ships roll in and then, despondently, [he’d] watch them roll away again, filled with thoughts of his cows back home.

Just a jump to the left

I love travel but not the journey. Maybe if I could afford first class travel I would think differently but I can’t. I’m an economy class girl.

But being there is a different story altogether. London is my favourite. My love affair started in 1975 with tickets to The Rocky Horror Picture Show on my second night there. You have to understand. I was Janet. I remember sitting in the theatre in the West End with no idea what to expect. The play opened and 20 minutes in, Tim Curry strode down the main aisle, singing Sweet Transvestite. I was sunk.

Don’t get strung out

By the way I look

Don’t judge a book by its cover

I’m not much of a man

By the light of day

But by night I’m one hell of a lover

His energy was infectious and I think imbued London with everything I imagined it would be. Excitement, sex, sparkle, glamour – all with a patina of tackiness and quirkiness. The feeling has never left me.

And I felt a change

Time meant nothing

Never would again.

Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to travel more widely – Canada, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Thailand, Australia. But I always come back to London. Britain really, as I’ve lived and visited elsewhere in the UK – Leeds, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Birmingham – but London at heart. It was there I also met people who weren’t even allowed to enter South Africa at the time. Political activists who made my ‘jump to the left’ a reality.

My ideals and attitudes have developed over the years but their beginnings were in the smoky pubs of London in the Seventies. Too theoretical to stay the same for long but they formed the basis for my work for the rest of my life.