Where did you go to, my lovely?

A couple of weeks ago, I happened to watch a programme on the music of 1969. I was seven or so then, and one of the few popular songs that reached inside me and planted or nurtured a seed in my imagination of myself and what I might become was a folk/pop song by Peter Sarstedt called "Where do you go to, my lovely?" For me, then and now, it had all the right ingredients; though it doesn't bear much critical analysis, I know every line...
Having heard it again forty-something years later, I went to get a copy on iTunes. Instead of the original, though, I discovered a cover version by Julian Davies (whom I'd never heard of before). Unlike most covers, this is better, as is his interpretation of the David Gray numbers. Try it out, and see if you agree. http://www.juliandavies.org.uk/Site/CD_-_ITUNES_and_LINKS.html

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Turbulence (Thanks for all the fish, and more)

[Note: this piece is not about about my family, nor does it involve literary or musical criticism. I’m not anticipating any attractive illustrations or other lures, and no musical accompaniment either. So if that’s what you came for, look away now. There will be more such articles in the future, I hope, but this is not one of them. You have been been warned.] Tokushima Naruto Whirlpool (Shikoku Excursion) Events of the last few days have left me, both literally and figuratively, in a painfully disordered state of mind. In plain English, I’m stressed, and my head aches. Actually, it twinges, rather than aches, but the precise description matters little; at all events, the pain ‘comes and goes’, as they say. (Where pain goes to, when it goes, is a puzzle in itself. I have this anthropomorphised image of Pain, like some peripatetic poison dwarf, doing the rounds of the neighbourhood: “Hi, Nigel didn’t want me this hour, so I’ve decided to drop in on you for a while. Don’t worry thoug...

What's love got to do with it?

Click here to play the first track [Youtube] When I was young/My father said Son, I have something to say And what he told me I'll never forget Until my dying day... ( Cliff Richard, Bachelor Boy, 1963) Since just after Justin's birth, I have tried to be positive and optimistic about our future, and particularly about the challenges presented by his condition. Sometimes, as will have been clear from other posts, this positivity is aided by an ostrich-like refusal to contemplate future eventualities, but mostly, it's because I feel we've been really lucky: he had no postnatal medical complications; he's loved and accepted by his brothers, he's growing well; there's even a hint of a smile on his face... There are some days, though, when optimism seems like an overwhelming challenge, days when I almost lose the will to move forward, and when I look around for a large tub of sand (something, like litter bins, that is in desperately short supply in u...

Cambridge Blues ('Foundationed deep')

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Devenish

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