Listen, if you had to pick a single incident that encapsulates your life in all its bewildering multifarious absurdity then what would it be?
Mine dates back a few years; I'd been attending an evening class and with no public transport back to where I lived until the following morning spent the night in the vacated home of an elderly aunt, who had died in hospital a few weeks before. With no children of her own the house and everything in it had been inherited by my mum and her brother, but as it was going to take a while to clear out and prepare to for sale there was no harm in my staying there. I quickly discovered the television had broken down, and wanting for some form of diversion curiosity naturally led me to browsing through her personal effects.
Now God knows who's going to read this but if you've ever had reason to look through the posessions of somebody that's died you'll appreciate what a strange and chastening experience this can be. At first you entertain flights of fancy that you'll discover some hitherto undisclosed chapter in their past; that beneath the reserved facade of Christian piety there was somebody quite different. The truth of course was altogether more banal; there were no skeletons in my aunt's closets, just endless piles of junk mail for dubious prize draws. It transpired she'd spent a good part of her latter years applying for these pointless competitions and being duped into frittering her pension on the cheap, vulgar tat these vultures try and flog. You wouldn't believe how many plastic clocks and portable radios there were hanging around the place. My aunt had lived in that house for something like eighty-five years, but aside from a handful of curios and some furniture her legacy was one of worthless junk.
There was a pervasive and rather uncomfortable silence in the old house, so when I chanced upon an old box-set of Reader's Digest compilation tapes called 'The Greatest Love Songs' then at the very least it offered some kind of respite. Of course, as I perused the track listings it quickly became clear the title was a misnomer; the most notable quality of these largely middle-of-the-road pop tunes was how quickly most had been forgotten. But I'm fairly eclectic in my tastes and managed to pick out a few tracks that were at least kitschly tolerable; cue (with the aid of fast forwarding) a medley of Kelly Marie's handbag disco stomper 'Feels Like I'm In Love', Abba's 'The Winner Takes It All' and... David Soul's 'Silver Lady'.
It was with the last song in particular something seemed to connect, perhaps amplified by the memory and melancholy of being in that place alone. I must have listened and sung along to it a dozen odd times, and the line about being "a million miles from home" resonated. Not in any literal sense, but because of the notion of being far from one's romantic ideal and where you want to be. Yet isn't that yearning and struggle the very essence of everything? In a nutshell then here was my world; dancing about in a room by myself absorbed in a strangely beautiful whimsy.
Now the point of this isn't that David Soul's pop career is in desperate need of reappraisal; I guess it could have been one of a hundred other bubblegum 45's. No, what I'm trying to illustrate is that life is half poetic and half ridiculous, and sometimes you can't tell one from the other.
Mine dates back a few years; I'd been attending an evening class and with no public transport back to where I lived until the following morning spent the night in the vacated home of an elderly aunt, who had died in hospital a few weeks before. With no children of her own the house and everything in it had been inherited by my mum and her brother, but as it was going to take a while to clear out and prepare to for sale there was no harm in my staying there. I quickly discovered the television had broken down, and wanting for some form of diversion curiosity naturally led me to browsing through her personal effects.
Now God knows who's going to read this but if you've ever had reason to look through the posessions of somebody that's died you'll appreciate what a strange and chastening experience this can be. At first you entertain flights of fancy that you'll discover some hitherto undisclosed chapter in their past; that beneath the reserved facade of Christian piety there was somebody quite different. The truth of course was altogether more banal; there were no skeletons in my aunt's closets, just endless piles of junk mail for dubious prize draws. It transpired she'd spent a good part of her latter years applying for these pointless competitions and being duped into frittering her pension on the cheap, vulgar tat these vultures try and flog. You wouldn't believe how many plastic clocks and portable radios there were hanging around the place. My aunt had lived in that house for something like eighty-five years, but aside from a handful of curios and some furniture her legacy was one of worthless junk.
There was a pervasive and rather uncomfortable silence in the old house, so when I chanced upon an old box-set of Reader's Digest compilation tapes called 'The Greatest Love Songs' then at the very least it offered some kind of respite. Of course, as I perused the track listings it quickly became clear the title was a misnomer; the most notable quality of these largely middle-of-the-road pop tunes was how quickly most had been forgotten. But I'm fairly eclectic in my tastes and managed to pick out a few tracks that were at least kitschly tolerable; cue (with the aid of fast forwarding) a medley of Kelly Marie's handbag disco stomper 'Feels Like I'm In Love', Abba's 'The Winner Takes It All' and... David Soul's 'Silver Lady'.
It was with the last song in particular something seemed to connect, perhaps amplified by the memory and melancholy of being in that place alone. I must have listened and sung along to it a dozen odd times, and the line about being "a million miles from home" resonated. Not in any literal sense, but because of the notion of being far from one's romantic ideal and where you want to be. Yet isn't that yearning and struggle the very essence of everything? In a nutshell then here was my world; dancing about in a room by myself absorbed in a strangely beautiful whimsy.
Now the point of this isn't that David Soul's pop career is in desperate need of reappraisal; I guess it could have been one of a hundred other bubblegum 45's. No, what I'm trying to illustrate is that life is half poetic and half ridiculous, and sometimes you can't tell one from the other.