I write good...

A writer friend once told me that I write good. This was when we were unconventional penpals; he was a music writer and record store owner in his late 50s and I was a 20 something singer-songwriter on my overseas adventure, dragging my 76 note weighted keyboard from bar to bar on the London Underground, cursing that I never learnt to play the guitar. He was a friend of my parents back in the 70s when they were in bands, but this was the 90s and email was a new thing, so I’d sit in the Easyjet café in Victoria eating a curried egg baguette and for £2 an hour I’d type away my woe to my old friend back home. We grew this kind of therapy between us, bonding over the most cringeworthy moments of our respective lives, dripping with sarcasm and embellishment to humour each other and lighten our respective loads. He would keep me up to date on all the gossip about people I didn’t know but knew of, in a way that made me feel like a trusted confidante, like part of a scene I wasn’t. From the outside looking in, my nose pressed against the glass, I imagined he might one day write to others of me. He believed in me in a way that my family couldn’t, my lyrical content too close to the bone, my lack of self-belief inherited, passed down from generations of people who didn’t feel good enough at the thing they were good at. He taught me I guess that to write gave angst reason. He told me I write good and I believed him. I was a little bit gothic, excessively empathic and full of feelings I couldn’t quite express in my songs. He got me, saw me. He drew those thoughts out of me and onto the screen. He liked my music even when it was a bit shit. He gave good feedback, honest critique that wasn’t too offensive and which I appreciated because of his expertise. He was well respected in my country for his writing and commentary. When I returned home I’d go over for dinner at his beautiful house with his wonderful wife and their famous friends, and sometimes I would bang out a new tune on the piano in the pool room. I always felt honoured to play for him and I miss those days, even when we were sometimes socially awkward in real time and liked each other better from inside our computers. He’d come out to see my band and the next day would email me his insights, often less about the music and more observations on the punters around him in the bar, or the interpersonal dynamics of the band which anyone who has been in a band will know is 95% of being in a band, the other 5% being actual music. I still have some of those emails printed out and I treasure them now that he is gone.

To write gives angst reason. I forgot this for a few years as antidepressants glazed me over, emails gave way to social media, and attention spans got shorter, condensing into 2 minute video clips and single image memes, and life got busier, and I got married and divorced and married and divorced again, and life became laundry and I grew my children in the suburbs. Bills needed to be paid by jobs that made me die inside and the grind became blinding, and the kinds of tragedies and traumas life dealt made me nostalgic for a time when I could turn a fight with my flatmate or my work as a session musician ending up in a porn film into a hilarious 3 page account to my old friend back home. A time when my biggest problem was deciding which of two boyfriends I really wanted to be with, or that I spent all afternoon on the train to Stoke to not be picked for a new manufactured girl band by a greasy haired puppeteer who didn’t even want to hear me sing. Needless to say I was not stoked, not because I wanted to be in his girl band but because I’d spent the last of my wages printing off a head shot he’d wanted that made me look like I didn’t actually have a body underneath, and I was just a floating, bobbing, discombobulated head. Touché.

Writing makes me feel better and that is what I need right now. My piano gathers dust in the lounge, a shelf for school-books and children’s artwork. Old hopes and dreams are pickled like last summer’s tomatoes. Jars of things we’ll never eat, decorations instead, desperately trying to make something of something and save what we can. You never know when there might be a global pandemic and we won’t be able to get to the shops. At least we’ll have pickled tomatoes. Gothic empathy and a need for that new buzz phrase “work-life-balance” evolved into a career holding space for others as a yoga teacher. Breathing and stretching and silence and stillness reminds me I’m still alive, a person inside, not just a mother and a failure. My class plan is my setlist, every posture set-up a micro performance. I learned to be calm in the storm, but it still swirls all around me, up the sides and gets in underneath. I am equally blessed and cursed to see all sides of a thing. I am darkness and light, I love and loathe my life. I am the yin and the yang, the sun and the moon. I am a record spinning. I write good. And I’m gonna write my way out of where I am. Come along for the ride, I have so much to share with you….