Music - Finding my way back and forward - 3, and back and forward!

Mike3

This week my journey through the music of my life took an unusual turn.  I say that.  In fact it's taken many turns, backwards, forwards and sideways, linking many bits of my life together.  This is something of a long and rambling post the twists and turns of which are almost certainly much more interesting to me than to you, and to help you keep up with all those twists and turns I'm going to put some words in bold. Unless you're familiar with my love life, you'll find you soon need them, in order to get all the different Mike's straight in your mind.  (There have been three of them and all have died.)

Way back in December I was discussing the musician Johnny Coppin with a friend and mentioned that I used to own a cassette of an album of his, "Forest, Vale and High Blue Hill".  It turned out that I had rashly decided to dump all my cassettes prior to moving, including not only this gem but also recordings I'd made of my grandparents reading out loud and other family snippets from the sixties and seventies, all because I was trying to downsize and currently didn't have a cassette player.  So much spilt milk.

I tried to find a copy of the album but came up with nothing, even asking various local contacts who all reported that it seemed to be something that was only released on vinyl and cassette.

My third Mike (in a life partner sort of way), who was in fact Mike2 because I met him second, died in 2023.  He decreed no funeral or ceremony of any kind, believing as I and his elder son did at the time that the two of us would meet over an expensive bottle of wine to lament his passing.  Because of various health issues for both of us this is clearly no longer on the cards, so I'm left without a ritual to mark Mike's passing.  I've recently decided to hold a small memorial ceremony (with a celebrant) here at home and have been researching the music we might listen to.

While searching for music for Mike's memorial a week or so ago I thought I'd have one more go on the Johnny Coppin trail.  I found his website - but not the album title.  As a last step I emailed him to ask if there was a digital version floating out there in the ether somewhere.  And discovered that it had been incorporated in another album with the title "The Gloucestershire Collection".

A couple of phone calls, a bank payment and a short wait for Royal Mail and the CD The Gloucestershire Collection was in my hands.  

Many of the songs on my original album were based on poems by the Dymock Poets.  (You can find out even more about them at Friends of the Dymock Poets and by reading the book by  Sean Street, The Dymock Poets.  In one of the bizarre turns I mentioned up there ^ Sean Street and his wife are friends of mine!  The Dymock poets were from the Forest of Dean, the westermost part of Gloucestershire.

Mike1 (my first husband, who died in 1991) was also a poet and certainly knew about The Dymock Poets.  He had an extensive poetry library (around 700 books, I seem to remember) which I'm sorry to say I have severely culled over the years and although he would almost certainly have owned a copy of Sean's book, I find that I no longer do.  Forest, Vale and High Blue Hill was released in 1983 and that's when I owned a copy on cassette but again, I no longer have it.  Mike1 and I both loved Gloucestershire, although neither of us was native to it, and we frequently used to travel to places near Gloucester to watch the Severn Bore.

Naturally, as soon as the CD arrived I started listening to it and was immediately struck with some regret.  For whatever reason (the most likely  being the mundane one of no longer playing cassettes) I didn't share the Johnny Coppin songs with Mike3 (who died in 2014).  As I listened today I realised how many of them spoke his language.  He was a countryman and a true Cotswold Lad.  (He used to quip, "I'm a Gloucestershire lad, born and bred: strong in the arm and thick in the 'ed".  This last was most certainly untrue!) The poems and the tunes Johnny Coppin set them to were in forms Mike would have appreciated.  Being on the autistic spectrum was, I'm sure, why he liked music to have notable structure and tunes and songs to have verses and choruses.  The Songs of Gloucestershire deliver both in spades.  Mike appreciated the writings of poets who had gone out of fashion, such as Rudyard Kipling (he moved past the possible racism contained in Kipling's poems to appreciate them as having been written of their time.)  He would have loved the Dymock Poets if I'd introduced them to him.

I'm so pleased to be able to listen to these songs once again.  They speak, no, they sing out of  Gloucestershire.  I've lived here for nearly 50 years and spent much of my childhood visiting my grandparents in Bourton-on-the-Hill and now consider myself a Gloucestershire lass.  I should probably think of buying a fresh copy of Sean's book.

Book Review - "Room"

I thought I had better redress the balance after my review of The Gargoyle and give an example of a book which is packed with feeling from start to finish and luckily the very next book I read was such a book.

I confess that after The Gargoyle my faith in my own ability to choose a good book had been rather damaged, so it was with a little trepidation that I began Room by Emma Donoghue.  I needn't have worried.  I read about forty pages in bed one night and then consumed the rest of the book the following day.  This is what books should be like, in my view.  I want the book to become more important than the rest of my life so that I can do nothing else until it is finished.

The first time I remember this happening very clearly was during my "A" level year, when I started reading Lord Of The Rings.  I got to a certain point in the book and realised that it was probably more productive to just abandon my studies completely until I had finished reading it than snatch hours here or there and spend the rest of the time between worrying that I wasn't studying enough and missing the book.  Since then it's been the benchmark of a really good book that it can grab me that way.


So, back to Room.  This may not be in my top ten all time books, but it's up pretty high. I remember choosing it because from the blurb, I thought it was a great "what if" plot.  I 've always been fascinated by human psychology and was looking forward to exploring the effects of an extremely unusual situation on the development of the central character, a five-year-old child.  What I wasn't expecting was to experience so much of what his mother feels as well, the more powerfully because those feelings are never described.  Through Jack's account of events we are also in touch with Ma's experience of them.  Without being over-sentimental, the story was nevertheless very moving.

*   *   *   *   *   *

I may not write any more book reviews here.  (Feedback on whether I should would be appreciated.)  As I think I've indicated, I enjoy most books I read and as I found it much, much more difficult to write about this enjoyable book than I did about the one I hated, the omens are not good.

Book Review - "The Gargoyle"

I haven't written about books here before but I've been prompted to start because of The Gargoyle.

I don't know why I bought this book.  A couple of months ago I was buying something else on Amazon and decided to treat myself to a couple of novels.  I was thinking ahead to having some holiday time and had just paid some cheques into my account and I decided I could probably afford it so long as I got on with it and spent the money on books before I noticed it was needed for something else.  The book may have been recommended to me by a friend but I'm beginning to doubt that.  Perhaps I just liked the sound of it and it was part of a "Buy all three for a knock-down price" package.

I've been gradually getting back into reading this year.  Finding the odd time to pick up a book again.  It's part of getting back a life but it's something I've found difficulty finding time for in the last six or seven years, to be honest.  As always, reading has been more concentrated into holiday time than any other time but I've mentioned that holiday time has been rather sparse round here so reading has more or less fallen by the wayside for some years.

So then The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson fell into my lap. 

The blurb on the back uses words like "engrossing, spectacularly imaginative, extraordinary, romance".  "The pages almost turn themselves."  (What?!)  I think it's supposed, amongst other things, to be about the ultimate quality of love.  Or possibly the quality of ultimate love.

The descriptions are thorough.  Emotions of many kinds are described at great length, with detail, embellished by all the sorts of things you expect in magical realism, which should have been a warning to me as I'm not really a fan. 

I've spent the morning, the first of my holiday, finishing the book.  I always want to get to the end, to find out what's going to happen and in that respect this book was no different.  I like to tie up loose ends.  Follow the threads that start early on in the book and find out where they lead.  Well, I did that.

But I really, really disliked the book.  And this is very rare for me.  I'll read all kinds of rubbish just to find out what happens to people.

Over the past few weeks I've been wondering what it was that I was disliking but this morning it has become clear.  I didn't care about anything or anyone in the book.  I felt nothing except boredom. All that excessive description but nothing moved me.  Passion was written about but seemed to me to be entirely absent in itself.  It really felt more like an academic exercise, proof that it could be done.  I think a book should make me feel something, anything.  Writing is an art form and what's the point of any art form if it raises no reaction in the viewer?

It reminds me of a painter I knew.  He was well thought of.  Well, he was certainly well thought of by himself.  Had been to art college, studied properly and poured scorn on anyone calling themselves an artist who hadn't had that proper training.  He could execute a picture very well, no doubt about that.  When I looked at his pictures, though, I always thought, "Why?"  "What did you feel that prompted you to paint this picture?"  or even "What am I supposed to feel when I look at this picture?"

The Gargoyle is rather the same.  Yes, it's possibly clever, ties in all kinds of different layers of things which have been well researched.  It may even be well written. 

But why?