It’s Sunday evening, and you find me sitting in the dark of the junk room listening to a random chill-out Jazz playlist. It feels like Charlie Brown is going to wander past with Snoopy at any moment.
This morning – after scraping myself out of bed – I found myself alone around the house for the first couple of hours, so after picking up after everybody else, I found time for a coffee and a few minutes with Shania Twain and Tori Amos on the record player.
Guilty pleasures.
The rest of the day has been spent diving head-long into a pretend aeroplane rabbit hole. It’s not the first time. It won’t be the last. While doing so I completely missed catching up with some wonderful friends who had decided that sitting out on the green outside the houses with a glass of wine was a much more better idea than anything else that came to mind. They weren’t wrong.
Next time, perhaps.
Ok. The Jazz playlist just jumped the shark. I wandered away for a few minutes to make a coffee – and got accosted along the way by a hungry cat – on my return some jazz trio or other was playing the slowest rendition in recorded history of Wichita Lineman armed only with a piano, a cymbal, and a brush. Enough was enough – Glen Campbell is now filling the room with songs about cowboys, rhinestones, and “star-spangled rodeos”.
Glen Campbell always reminds me of my childhood. I’ve written before about visiting the US in the early 1980s – on the tail end of the “golden era” of country music. I guess because of that – because of the records my Uncle played, and the records my parents bought when I was little – I’ve always had a soft spot for it.
Perhaps it explains Shania too – and Taylor to an extent. I bought her first album years before anybody else knew who she was – tipped off by a friend in Oklahoma that I might like a tune she had heard on the radio that week.
I really should get in touch with her – the friend, not Taylor – we haven’t caught up in years. No doubt her adventures will make mine seem small and insignificant – they always have – but whenever we’ve crossed paths over the years it’s like we never stopped talking – like continuing a conversation after wandering into the kitchen to make a coffee.
Talking of old friends, I received an unexpected like on a blog post today. A smile crept across my face. It’s still there now. It reminded me that outside of the self-imposed bubble I inhabit, there is a very big world that has kept turning during all the time I’ve been absent from it.
All it takes is to do nothing for a little while, and weeds grow. Mangrove forests. Before you know it, the avenue through the woods you used to take doesn’t exist any more.
The strange thing? The woods only seem to be there in our mind. Nobody else can see the woods, the pathways, or the laughter and stories we once shared.