Don't know when I'll be back again

Bit of a maverick blog entry this, 2.30am and all the drunken sentimentality that entails. I apologise for none of this.

A couple of weeks ago, I made it along to my very first Bar Wotever. It's moved to Vauxhall now, so convenient for me for a drink on the way home and an early evening of Joe Poppism. I'd never met Joe Pop but had seen his very lovely photos. The man himself lived up to them in every sense, a beardy tattooed music meister, comin' atcha though the cornflakes!

Highlight of the night, for me, was Mr Pop's evocation of Mary Travers, the human-and-recognisable third of Peter, Paul & Mary. Joe P played Leaving On A Jet Plane, which is so wonderful and poignant it just has to be linked here:



I had a very pleasant discussion that night about the significance of Mary in terms of my early childhood. I was born in 1970, to parents who were, to some extent, limited by being the first in their respective families to aspire to a university education, and having both ventured outside the UK to practise their teaching.

I think they were confident professionally but less so in other areas of their lives. They'd have liked to have been hippies, but were too responsible to be properly bohemian. They made an effort, though. I grew up amid brown-painted walls, cane furniture, ostrich and peacock feathers (although this was a fairly brief trend) and my mother wafting around in maxi-dresses, sometimes risking the faintest hint of patchouli. Musically, my abiding memory of long car journeys is a mixed bag: Carpenters, Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel, Boney M...

Mary Travers' was the voice of my early life. I described it as a "female Oliver Postgate", and I stand by this. Postgate's was the voice of Bagpuss, the narrator of the Clangers. Hers was a profoundly reassuring tone, somehow pure and airy. And she was such a fabulously good Liberal, her voice seemed imbued humanist values. It really does come with a host of happy associations.

So... nice Wotever, but that's all for now. Later.

Shades of Scarlett conquering

Fiddle-de-dee.

Rummaging for my keys this morning in the junk-that-comes-out-of-your-pockets bowl in the kitchen, I automatically picked up my current Lucky Conker, as I usually do, and had another flashback to the past weekend's Duckie, when I talked chestnuts with live artist/photographer Harriet Poole. It made me aware of this particular quirk that I have - even if I didn't have the LC on me on Saturday. Here it is, though, with Saturday's Tube ticket:



I call it lucky but that's really just to justify carrying it around; I'm not especially superstitious and don't think of it as any sort of talisman. It's more a throwback to the childhood hoarding of "treasure", magpie-fashion: very shiny coins, shells, glittery pebbles - essentially worthless objects considered inherently pleasurable. I suspect quite a few people do this to some degree.

I picked up the current LC a week or two ago, when meeting a colleague for dinner, in Twickenham. There was a big horse chestnut tree, spilling grizzled brown-green casings and excitingly shiny, new-looking conkers onto the pavement (one landed on a car bonnet with a metallic bonk, as we passed). If I hadn't been in self-consciously sensible work mode, I'd have stopped and, in all likelihood, stuffed my suit pockets. As it was, I surreptitiously bent down and scooped one up when he wasn't looking.

We used to live just off a park which had several chestnut trees, and I'd collect them every day to and from work. They'd sit on windowsills and kitchen surfaces until, eventually, I conceded that I had to throw them out (they're not as seductive once they lose their fresh-from-the-shell gleam) to make space for more. These days, I've pared down my conker-acquiring urge to just the one at a time.

Apparently the game of Conkers was originally played with snail shells or hazel nuts, the horse chestnut not being native to the UK. Oddly enough, although I have all sorts of memories of throwing sticks in trees to try to get 'em down, I don't recall much actual playing of the game itself. I suspect many kids were, like me, more attracted to the idea (having seen Dennis the Menace and the Bash Street Kids get overexcited about Conkers) than the pastime, which all seemed a bit of a hassle. I did, however, dutifully file away in my head all the sneaky conker-hardening methods (baking, soaking in vinegar) in case I ever did find myself competing in the World Championships.

I seem to remember a brief craze, on Blue Peter, for stringing huge numbers of conkers on string, with groups of people proudly claiming to have strung five billion (or however many), pointlessly. This is what we did before t'Internet.

Ah, well. A woman must have everything.

Lost in a riddle last Saturday night

(Bloody hell, three posts in a day! You'd think I was avoiding the gym or something!)

In the early part of last night's Duckie, the ever-fragrant Kim Phaggs stirred a host of teenage memories by playing Mike Oldfield's Moonlight Shadow:



Apparently it came out in 1983, but I remember Moonlight Shadow from the very first Now That's What I Call Music album. I can't remember whether we owned the first one legitimately or whether it was pirated for me and my sister by our Dad, from a bloke at work. Dad had access to a tape-to-tape cassette recorder (the technological exoticism!) and would surprise us with recordings on C60 (actually, I've a feeling the Now albums needed C90 length), with track listings crammed in in his too-large handwriting.

(That was the year he and Mum separated, amid much angst, and the gift-giving to us kids increased on both sides. We weren't complaining. Not about the pressies, anyway.)

My memory of the song has always been connected with my memory of the video. Back then, MTV was only beginning and I used to sit for hours in front of the UK equivalent, Music Box (Mum had had cable television installed, possibly in an attempt to trump Dad's tape-to-tape pop affection-bribes), agog at music videos. I really was a child of the '80s in that sense: when I started buying music of my own, I not infrequently bought stuff on the strength of video alone, or mainly because I'd been seduced by the visuals (Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer comes to mind). I discovered a lot of excellent music this way: I got into Kate Bush largely through Running Up That Hill and Cloudbusting, working my way backwards through her (considerable) canon. I also bought quite a few one-hit wonders - like Moonlight Shadow.

I was fascinated by songs with narratives and always tried to work out the story in the lyrics - or impose a story of my own. The video's very evocative, with moonlit duels, '80s wind-machine hair and plenty of flicky-cloak running down corridors flanked by spooky servants bearing candelabra (although not quite as memorable in this regard as Bonnie Tyler at her classic best). According to Mike Oldfield, the song's inspired by the Tony Curtis Houdini film, with its theme of lovers reunited through spiritualism. I'm not quite sure what I thought the video was about: ghosts from the future and the suggestion of changelings? Whatever, I loved it. And Maggie Reilly reminded me of Kirsty MacColl, which is never a bad thing.

(Listening to it again, I'm reminded that the "4am in the morning" bit irks me slightly. As opposed to what, Mr Oldfield, Ms Reilly? 4am in the afternoon? Pedants R Us.)

Ah, memories. Proust had his madeleine; I have the marvellous Readers Wifes. Long may they surprise me.