22: Song and dance

Ring the bells that still can ring. 

Day 22.

19: Give and take

Winning at robots.

Confession time.

We cracked into the boxes shipped over an ocean to our doorstep. We did this on the flimsy pretext that we won't actually be at home on Christmas day.

What AWESOME toys for us the kids. We are lucky to have such a wonderful family (thanks guys).

Speaking of festive surprises, today I rediscovered one of my favourite Christmas carols in a Tesco ad (see video below), featuring cheerful mostly sober people. A slightly odd choice given the style of the song, which I would describe as "drunken obscenity volley".

If you live in Britain and have ever been to a pub, you know this song.

The plot involves that scraggly pair of substance-enthusiasts outside your local Tesco, engaged in a blazing holiday row.

Again, if you live in Britain and have ever left your home even for five minutes, you know this couple.



Typically, they have one remaining tooth between them, and are shouting about something both childish and obscene in voices that can only come from living rough and smoking whiskey.

My other half actually makes a point of saying hello to these star-crossed lovers, always with a smile and eye contact. He does this simply because he's noticed that no one else talks to them.

One Christmas he convinced a rowing Tesco couple to smile and stop punching each other while he took their portrait. Then he gave it to them as a present.

They were genuinely happy for at least five minutes. The woman said she would post it to her daughter, who had gone into care. It was like a Hallmark moment, if Hallmark had a Dickensian urban misery gift card range.

Amazing what a smile can do, with or without teeth.

However I remain terrified of hearing the "Sickbed of Cuchulainn" in the frozen peas aisle.

This week at Chaos HQ

Spoon full of sugar for the medicine. 

We've been dreaming in bi-cultural cupcakes and munching on Transatlantic flags. I've been humming one of my favourite American tunes. 

As the founding mama of this great modest house, I have been stubbornly clinging to the self-evident truth that all humans are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.

The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Be they young or old. Unlucky or lucky in the lottery of life. 

Woody Guthrie, one of my favourite patriots, says it best. 

The Dust Bowl Troubadour spent his strange and fascinating life showing fascists what hillbillies can do. This July marks the centenary of his birth. 

The timing is fitting: where their parents had job and housing opportunities, young people now have ample time to cultivate their folk music skills in the great outdoors. Fortunately, a folk music kit is pretty cheap and folds up easily for storage in a leaky bedsit, or under a park bench.

Happy birthday Woody - you are still the man for your time and place. 

Wake up time

It's half term and Chaos HQ has been riding the tube like a trio of hobos on the rails. We've been the scourge of the freebie museum circuit, the aquarium and the zoo.

Ana and I passed a busker on the way out of the underground yesterday. He was a beat-up broken sort of folk singer with a golden set of pipes. Ana, music lover and pirate, put some treasure in his cap and we carried on.

Rock me, baby.

On the way home we saw a different busker in exactly the same spot. Although he was similarly broken-looking, he sang from a different songbook, namely the one containing 'Always Look On the Bright Side of Life'. He sang it with the sort of earnest feeling that Monty Python never quite pulled off.

It was the middle of the day and the commuter crowd had dispersed, leaving him to sing to no one but himself and the footstep-modulated sunshine streaming in from the street above. I was struck by the stark loneliness of the image - a man in an empty rabbit run singing to the ether.

This town is silly with good musicians. They play in the street and sing to the underground as the human school swarms in and out on the working tide, unnoticing. They sing with persistence in the face of persistent ignoring.

My other half was born with the gift of music. He picked up a guitar somewhere in his youth and never put it down. And he's always been a singer. Over the years he has cultivated an eclectic arsenal of folk, gospel, blues, ranchera, and rock tunes. Like Steve Zissou, the girls and I (and sometimes Neffe too) live with a guitar-strummer in every scene, and our family life has a rolling soundtrack. We are hugely blessed in this regard, although I suppose we've become accustomed to it in the manner that you can become accustomed to any amazing thing that you experience every day.

Short folk. 

Music has been an important part of the girls' lives since they were days old. It quickly became Papa's means of quieting them when they were deep in the throws of pediatric demon possession. At one point just after Ana was born, the only thing that comforted her was Papa singing 'Silent Night' on eternal repeat. 

The job of household master musician is a lonely one. Papa plays on when his kids are trying to chew the guitar strings off. There is no profit and no reward. They usually don't even remember to clap. Often they wander off in the middle of a particularly lovely rendition of 'Life in a Northern Town' to smack their heads on toys in the other room. I've frequently seen grown-ups respond in a similar manner to beautiful music - it just seems to be a folk musician's lot in life. 

I wasn't born with the musical gift. I can do a very accurate impression of a rusty hinge warbling. I don't demonstrate this skill at parties anymore, because there's no better way to ruin a festive atmosphere than to burst an eardrum.

I've noticed something about the lonely musicians in my house and on the underground: they achieve total focus, and they really wail. My research indicates that their real trick* is to hit song hard and not give a toss about who's listening. A trick I've never managed to pull off in life, but I hope my girls will. Because with confidence like that, you could do just about anything.

Baby blues. 

Occasionally I manage to escape my captors for five minutes and find a keyboard (qwerty) that hasn't been slathered in ketchup. Sometimes scribbling is great fun, but other times it feels like a chore. I begin to wonder if I should instead concentrate my limited spare energy on more useful stuff, like cultivating an intentional hairstyle and paying the gas bill.

At one point last week I found myself staring blankly at the monitor, drifting off on a really boring daydream about soup (vegetable - the boringest of soups). I looked down and realised that my trousers were covered in a colourful Jackson Pollock of kid-food detritus. Then I looked up and found Ana standing stock still at my elbow. Her face made it clear that she was about to drop wisdom.

'Mama,' she said, 'wake up.'

A thought I've been mulling over a lot this week, as I listen to one of my favourite songs.

*I don't mean the trick to paying the gas bill. There are better tricks for that, and I am a lousy expert in that department. What I mean some sort of fuzzy hippie notion about finding equilibrium and joy.

Songs the sunshine sang to me

Listening to Tom Petty on full volume is a guilty pleasure of mine. Especially as I drive through dark, drizzly English mornings. To my ears, Wildflowers is the sound of sunshine and a reminder that I lived in Southern California for a spell.

Mind you, living in SoCal is annoying in at least a hundred ways. But Wildflowers makes me remember only the good things about it - several imaginary good things even. Which is the point of nostalgia after all.



A tardy post for Mumra's Friday playlist (thanks - love the idea).

Paradise

I left my copy of 'On the Road' in New Mexico. Which I regret, because I'm on a travel moratorium until Chaos and Destruction learn to wear seatbelts for more than five minutes without screaming.

Off the road. 

And yet my feet itch, so I'm glad Kate Takes 5 brought up the subject of places. Although Johnny Cash is the master in this regard, here are mine:

1. Monterey, California
2. Taos, New Mexico
3. Berlin, Germany
4. Cozumel, Mexico

My mind is in Monterey, gazing out at the big blue Pacific (where the tide pools teem with life), searching for the ghost of Steinbeck's Cannery Row. My spirit is in Berlin, running through the Tiergarten in autumn, giggling at nude sunbathers, drinking pils with my sister. All of me pines for snow on yellow aspen leaves in Taos. And for a pair of coronas on a shoddy Cozumel balcony at sunset, after a day of dodging barracudas at Chankanaab reef.

The beaten track.

In body, I am a sidekick and food-flinging target to a pair of short people. Funny how this makes my memories of paradise seem all the more vivid.