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

Misty blue

Recently, a number of my friends have been having issues with aged parents – either illness, senility or death. This has never been a part of my life because both my parents unfortunately died when I was young. My mother had terrible cancer and died the year I turned seventeen. She was younger than I am now. My father lived longer, re-married and died aged seventy-two, now more than twenty years ago. So I have experienced illness and death at close range but nothing is so devastating as sudden death.

My daughter’s boyfriend was killed in a car crash. That was it. Just gone. She was overseas and came back the next day. This song played in the car as I drove to the airport to fetch her. Not a dirge at all but a song about lost love

Ohhhhhhh, no I can’t no I can’t

I can’t forget you

My whole world turns misty blue

I felt that as I drove – a kind of haze in front of me. But in it I could imagine him quite clearly, see his face and hear his voice, see them together and remember the very last time I saw him.  It really is almost impossible to believe you’ll never see someone again. A life turned misty blue.

I think now far more often about my own parents. I can’t imagine them older yet I visualise them with my daughter, the grand-daughter they never knew, and perhaps even her children, my still-to-come grandchildren and their great-grandchildren. What I am most sorry about is not taking more notice of them when they were alive.

My parents were of pioneer stock in what was then Southern Rhodesia. My dad owned a gold mine and then a cattle ranch and through our early years he would tell stories about prospecting for gold, hunting, living in the bush, and running the farm. We heard about the buck he shot, the dogs he owned, we knew the names of all the cows he milked and the men who had worked for him over the years. They were superb stories but we took it for granted that would just always be there. No blogs then.

My mom was always in the background but at the same time, really important. She ran the house and grew the most amazing dahlias. She hand-made all our clothes and taught us to sew and bake. She was there for us when we went to school and came home and she and Dad sat talking together for hours in the evenings. I would like to think she was an equal partner in all he did. I’ll never know because I never asked.

I remember them both in the same haze. It’s just fainter.

There’s a kind of hush

I had no idea what unconditional love was until I had a child. Sounds dramatic doesn’t it? But honestly, someone once asked me that ridiculous question “would you throw yourself under an oncoming car to save someone?” I mean, really. Why on earth would you if they were stupid enough to run into the road in the first place? But, if it is your child? Then it’s completely different. Yup, I would. No question.

I had my daughter when I was a bit older. 34, which doesn’t sound too old now as so many woman wait to have babies much later in life, but there’s always more of a risk. So I was pregnant in the summer of a very hot 1986 and spent most of my days over Christmas that year wallowing in a pool like a very large hippopotamus.

Then one night in early January my waters broke – honestly, all I felt was relief because it was cool! – and off I went to hospital. Four hours later and I was induced. Ha. I had taken meditation classes during my pregnancy (remnants of my hippie days) and set off with a book, determined to breathe through it all and come out the other end glowing and unscathed but with a beautiful bundle to show off. Ha again. It was agony. My husband fainted and was rushed out and offered tea by the nurses. No tea for me. I simply pushed on (literally) and was finally delivered of a little girl.

I wrote a diary while in the hospital and it tells of my first breath of Katrine. A warm, musty smell and a whimper from a scrunched up little face, and that was it. I was in, for life.

All though her early years I would sing her to sleep. I knew every word of the song …

There’s a kind of hush all over the world tonight

All over the world you can hear the sounds of lovers in love

You know what I mean

Just the two of us and nobody else in sight

There’s nobody else and I’m feelin’ good just holdin’ you tight

And that really does say it. It was just so good holding her. Over the years she grew and I hated it. I loved holding her body and feeling her skin. Now she’s 28 and taller than me but still has the most incredible soft, silky skin. I put it down to her rich and fertile breeding ground and the sheer force of my love for her!

So listen very carefully

Closer now and you will see what I mean

It isn’t a dream

The only sound that you will hear

Is when I whisper in your ear

“I love you forever and ever”