Glimpsesofcolour

The first mist this morning, the sun peering through it like a veiled bride – and now the bride has gained confidence , thrown off her veil and shines radiant as the day. As it were…

Yesterday I was listening in my car to the soundtrack CD of the film Good Morning Vietnam (which I have actually never seen). What an excellent collection of tracks. Not only Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild, which I only had on vinyl (Easy Rider album) before; but also that classic Lovin’ Spooonful song ‘Summer in the City’, which deserves a lot more airplay than it gets, not to mention the Zombies’ ultra-sexy Time of the Season, and the Easybeats’ Friday on my Mind, the best Friday song ever written.
The Zombies, or what’s left of them, are performing at my local theatre next month – can’t decide whether to miss something else in order to catch them. I heard the Yardbirds there not long ago and it was a wonderful nostalgiafest, with a decidedly middle aged audience – sitting in rows of seats at a rock concert!
All right, my musical taste is a bit Radio 2 – but that’s only because Radio 2 has totally transformed since my day when it hosted such programmes as ‘Sing Something Simple’. Radio 2 (mostly) rocks these days. And I do also like Franz Ferdinand, and the Kaiser Chiefs, so there. I expect my son is deeply embarrassed at having a mother who stays in her parked car to listen to the end of a Rolling Stones track, waving her arms about and jiggling her head in a half-hearted attempt at sedentary dancing…

PS Tired & Emotional, I have no idea why your GMV soundtrack is different from mine. Unless it’s a pond thing.

Maybe it’s because I’m Jewish (Rosh Hashanah’s in two days time, but I had to look that up) or maybe it’s a legacy of arriving at university in a glorious blue and gold October, but it’s always seemed to me that autumn is a much better time to start a new year than the grey misery of January (relieved only by my birthday) can ever be.
Today’s a case in point: brilliant blue sky, low but intense Indian summer sun, and just enough crispness in the air to put a spring (or is that a fall?) in the step. Autumn’s when the school year starts again after the slog of keeping a child entertained for the holidays, and when I turn from being a full time mum for six long weeks, and return to my other identity as a writer. It’s also when I start to think again about getting a life, the ingredients of which are such joys as singing classes, writers’ workshops, weekend retreats – all the things that don’t happen while teachers are enjoying their much deserved break and temporarily transferring the load back to parents ((if you happen to be both, I guess you are just a hardier breed than I).
So here it all begins again, the ‘you’ll be amazed’ circus act of balancing parenthood, church life, work, housewifery (when did I marry a house? I have no idea), and attempts at preserving – or should that be establishing? – sanity in the midst of it all. And believe it or not (and to change the metaphor), I actually love trying to keep taut all these various strings to my bow and somehow making music out of them all, even if it’s only a distressed screeching. Which seems as good a place as any to launch into a blog that’s about the fact that the alternative to black and white is not grey, but an infinite spectrum of extraordinary colours. Of which fact I need to remind myself often, since as a depressive, grey is too often my default. Today, however, is blue and gold…