All Aboard

Woo Hoo! All aboard the Christmas anxiety train.

Whoever you are, it is likely that the prospect of Christmas makes you feel a little stressed. There are extra things to do and a deadline. If you are a bit anxious that extra stress will make you feel more anxious. If you are a musician then the ‘extra things’ can easily run to two extra A4 pages on your “let’s try to pretend to be a normal person without anxiety” list. If you are also an idiot you’ll keep adding things and make everyone join you on the ‘New Improved Christmas Sparkle Anxiety Train.’

I am an idiot.

As if the lead up to Christmas wasn’t busy enough, with normal music teacher/MD of a Youth Orchestra/member of a band stuff, I thought, “You know what would be fun? We should make a school Christmas CD.”

It will be fun. The children are already very excited. Every child in the school is involved with each class learning one song and what could be better than listening to the whole school singing Away in a Manger while you eat your Christmas Dinner? They have been given a chance to design the CD case cover and I hope I’ve created a buzz around the project.

Also, it should raise some much needed cash for the school. We have been surviving with an ever decreasing number of music stands that we haven’t got the money to replace. We even have one held together with sticky tape. Everyone’s budgets for music have been squeezed, so that things we used to get for free we now have to pay for. For example, Sing Up and Charanga are wonderful online resources that used to be free and now cost hundreds of pounds each a year. It’s true that if we had never had them then we would have to make do with books and talent but as each recorder book costs £7 (= class set £200 and it’s illeagal to photocopy), each school singing book with music in is over £10 and the cost of a pianist who can play well enough to accompany at concerts is phenomenal, these apps are still good value for a school that does music properly. Many schools opt not to do music properly and there are some people who think of it as a subject that should just be for a few. Music is such a fundamental human response to things that it would be great if we could teach all children how to do it well. Children singing in tune can heal a broken heart (trust me) and people not even being able to clap in time can break one.

I have found a company (My School CD) that will do the sound recording, engineering and production. All I have to do is find the music, rehearse, make a timetable for the day, send off the paperwork, write new words to a carol for a staff song, stay excited about the project and sell enough CDs so that we don’t lose any money. It’s not keeping me awake at night at all.

Woo Hoo. All aboard!

A brush with privilege

The other day, I wrote about the Prince Andrew interview and joked that an elderly Dame with a man’s name would leap to his defence and say that these grls (they don’t pronounce their vowels) only have themselves to blame. I was joking, not having seen Lady Colin Campbell’s outrageous interview, but my joke was based on a brief brush with privilege.

 I had met rich people at University: mainly public schoolboys that were a huge disappointment to their families but this was a whole other level

In my early twenties I took a research job with an Australian social psychologist. He was an absolutely lovely man and an expert on questionnaire design. It was a great job and also a glimpse into another world.
 He had been one of the first social psychologists at the LSE and pretty much designed all those courses in the UK. His wife was a member of the aristocracy (I think). She spent her life doing good work and rubbed shoulders with actual Princesses. His eldest daughter was one of the few female barristers and was dating a very famous novelist. His son was a bit of a playboy and was dating our office assistant. Our office was close to his home: a mansion flat overlooking one of the parks and he treated us like part of his family.

Once, when I had a migraine, he sent me home to his wife because he was worried about my long commute. She popped me on the sofa with a blanket to let me sleep it off, which was lovely but it was a shock to wake up in the middle of tea with Princess Michael of Kent.

It was more common that his children would join us for a lunchtime drink in the pub over the road. Elsie, the secretary was furious about the way playboy son spoke about his girlfriend. He introduced her to his friend as his Pa’s Goffah, “She goes for this, she goes for that and boy does she go!” he said nudging his pal in the ribs and winking. I didn’t really understand at the time just how little respect he was showing for her.

The mate was a distant member of the royal family. He bragged that his mother was Dame Brian Something or Other. The other research assistant kept her composure, catching my eye in warning but it was too late. I snorted my Bacardi and coke across the table.
“Brian? Brian? What kind of name is that for a woman? Is she a very naughty boy?”

That Interview

“The trouble with you, is that you’re an inverted snob,” my oldest school friend told me when I was 13 and telling her that I didn’t understand the economics lesson.  I really couldn’t comprehend why money was the most important thing.
“I just think people who have too much money are a little, well, you know...”
(She didn’t know)
“Selfish and self obsessed.”
We lived in Billericay and she was a trailblazer for the time, already enjoying regular fake tans and a desire to be the first female Formula One driver. She couldn’t think that you could have too much money and thought I was just jealous.

I could have been. I’d not met many people with money and my philosophy could have stemmed from jealousy. However, now that I’m older and have met quite a few very rich people, my view has not changed very much.

Having money gives a person choices. Having much more than you need doesn’t automatically make you a bad person but it does enable you to make as many bad choices as good ones.

Everyone is talking about the interview Prince Andrew gave to the brilliant Emily Maitlis on the BBC on Sunday night.  It was absolute car crash TV and will go down in history, like Frost/Nixon and they will make films about it. Somehow, even though you knew he was lying and everything he said made it worse you couldn’t tear yourself away. It was funny too. There are things from this interview that will enter our culture and in time we won’t even remember where they came from. In the future people caught out lying will just say, “I couldn’t sweat,” or “I’ve only been to Wokingham a few times,” or “Pizza Express.”

The thing everyone is really puzzled by, though, is misplaced. No one is wondering why someone with so much money and power did such awful things. We are wondering why he did the interview. Why did he dig himself into a hole? We knew he could get away with it if he said nothing. We are wondering if maybe it’s about to emerge that the Queen has, in fact, been dealing crack Cocaine and he has fallen on his sword to be a distraction when it comes to light.

We know about money and what it does to people.
We know about Prince Andrew, who we called Randy Andy in the Eighties.
We know he had more money than sense and didn’t even have a true purpose.
We know that the very rich don’t even need to pronounce all the letters (Ghislaine Maxwell, ‘my friend G(pronounced phonetically) Laine’)
We know that very rich people can take advantage of very poor people.
We know that if you have no money you will consider doing anything to eat or get some of that status.
We know that very young people are more attractive than older people.
We know young girls are desperate for rich powerful men to love them and are easily manipulated. We know that providing a girl to give a relaxing massage was code for sex in the eighties.
We know that he wouldn’t remember one girl.
We know there were more than one.
We know he wouldn’t have even looked at her face or considered that she was a real person.
We know that you can take a position as an ambassador for NSPCC, working on a campaign to spot the signs of sexual abuse and not see that you are an abuser.
We know Epstein is everything they say he is.
We know they were friends.
We know that when you are very rich you can laugh about the suicide of one of your best friends.
We know Prince Andrew used young girls for sex.
We know some ancient Royal dame with a man’s name will leap to his defence, explaining that “these girls only have themselves to blame.”
We know normal rules for names don’t apply to the super wealthy.
We know that anyone who financially benefits from the Royals will defend his actions.
We know that, even though he his publicly disgraced, he can’t be asked to resign.
We know that money gives power.
We know that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We know that this kind of thing will go on forever. We might have abolished slavery but using people to make money, or because you have so much money you don’t even see them as real people, is fun.
We know people will call for the end of the monarchy.
We know it won’t happen.
We know young girls don’t matter. (If a fading alcoholic footballer can kiss a girl on a train without her consent then a Prince can do anything)
We know it’s all very depressing.

I wish I’d never watched the interview but then I can’t sweat or eat at Pizza Express in Wokingham.

Why Do Robins Sing in November?

I love the song, ‘I know why (and so do you),’ by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. I loved it, again, when Manhattan Transfer re-recorded it. It was very uncool to love Manhattan Transfer but love them I did.  I could never get the words right, though.
It is: Why do Robins sing in December?
         Long before the springtime is due?
         And even though it’s snowing, violets are growing,
         I know why and so do you.
I always muddled the month. As long as the month ends in ‘ber’ then there’s no reason to think that you have sung it wrong. True, it’s unlikely to be snowing in September but stubbornly that is frequently what my brain chose to sing, whenever I saw a Robin.

It was also a song that my parents liked (Dad more than Mum, I think). I remember having a conversation with my Dad about it when I was about nine or ten. It was December and it was snowing. We were walking back from Lake Meadows Park with our tea trays, red faced with exhaustion. My sister was about 4, in her cute little round, naughty phase. She was wearing a pink and white furry coat that had become soaked through as snow had stuck in clumps to it when she rolled down the hill. The hood was up, making her face seem even rounder, like some exotic bear that had been plucked from its tropical environment to spend winter in a British zoo. She had begun to grizzle. I was glad to go home, as I could feel my throbbing chilblains within my wellies. As we walked, we seemed to be serenaded by robins, sitting on bare beaches and Dad joined them in song.
I never quite grew out of my annoying ‘why phase’ and so I asked, “But why do they? They song says I know why and so do you but I don’t.”
Dad explained that Robins don’t migrate like other birds and are really sociable, loving to chat to people all year round.
“But,” he went on to say, “It’s a song about love. They sing because of love. All songs are about love.”

Grief is a thing with feathers, as Max Porter wrote and even when you think you are not actively grieving anymore, something can fly up out of the blue and make you catch your breath.
The jumper department of Marks and Spencer at Christmas, a song on the radio, walking past someone wearing your descended loved one’s perfume. Today, it was a Robin.

Before my parents died I was a firm believer in no afterlife.
“When you’re dead, you’re dead,” I would say harshly, “a belief in an afterlife is just for those who can’t accept death.”
Then when Mum died and I went a bit bonkers I had this thing about birds. If you’ve been reading my blogs before, you will remember the bird series. I started to think that psychopomps were a real thing and that the Greek myth of spirits coming back, as birds to guide people towards death might be true. We felt that my dad had chosen to be a very noisy, slightly angry Robin. As I trudged around the streets and footpaths in my traumatised state I spotted birds everywhere and wrote about them here.

I have been clearing my Mum’s art studio and put aside a couple of empty sketch pads to give to one of my pupils who loves art. An hour or two after she had left, her mum sent me some photos of her using the books already. Her first picture. A Robin.

Why do robins sing in November? I know why and so do you.

The Numbers of a School Trip

School trips can be stressful for teachers because it’s all about counting. You spend the day counting your children. Yesterday, we sang at the Royal Albert Hall for a concert in aid of the Barnardo’s charity. It’s a great thing to do and I’m sure I’ve written about it every year.

After the concert it can take a while for my brain to return to normal. The counting gets stuck and this year I have a whole load of numbers buzzing around in my head.

6 - Time to leave the house
30 - children  (count repeatedly, panic when you have less. Feel confused if you count more: they will keep moving)
3 - wonderful colleagues to come with me (and make the day run smoothly and easily)
29 - other schools
98 - children in the school behind us (fools)
1311 - people on stage
2 - conductors (Douglas Coombes = genius and his wife Carole Lindsay Douglas = also genius with sparkly tops)
76 - Trombones
1 - Trevor (on the organ)
11 - times I told my choir that Trevor was going to be my next husband.
110 - cornets
2 - wobbly teeth
3 - rocking mice
 5 - times I said, “Go to the toilet now, even if you don’t need to.”
180 - minutes until the next toilet break
15 - photos for Twitter
101  - photos to make a great display board
 33 - photos that came out blurred (they will keep moving)
5 - hours of rehearsal
2 - one hour food breaks
3 - hours on stage for the concert
87 - times I felt proud of our choir
17 - minutes of life I lost due to the ill advised screaming session by the Barnardo’s ambassador
32 - flights of stairs in the day to get between waiting area and stage
14- songs sung
16 - times one of my choir rolled her eyes at her brother
3233 - words sung
 3200 - words learnt by my choir (we never got Big Bang bonger  at the rear right)
3 - times one of my choir felt sick.
0 - words learnt by some schools.
5544 - people in the audience (I didn’t count but it was full to capacity)
4 - children left behind by a school (that will remain nameless) at the end of a concert (this would be my worst nightmare)
9 - children going home with their parents
21 - hyper children on the coach
7 - times they sang ‘The Wheels on the Bus’
12 - The time I arrived home
9 - days before we start rehearsing for our next concert (There’s no rest for the talented)

Half Term Haunting

The October half term holiday used to be my favourite. Apart from a little planning and arranging of Christmas carols and songs there’s not usually too much to do. It’s not like having to write report comments. When the children were smaller, I loved Halloween. We would go to the allotment and collect and carve pumpkins. I’d make spooky food, like witch finger chicken strips, ghost biscuits, spider web cakes and a jelly brain. They would have all their friends round and I would tell stories and we would play games. I managed to convince my neighbours children that I had actually been to a school for witches, so that when Harry Potter came out they could tell everyone that they knew someone who had been to Hogwarts. Obviously, I’d never mentioned the name of the school because, well, you don’t tell Muggles, do you?

This half term hasn’t been as much fun. 

I miss having small children around. I miss the pretend haunting. 

This half term has been filled with the kind of haunting that no one wants. The kind of haunting that makes me cross. The sort that I don’t want to admit to. 

There was one of those silly things that appear on Twitter that said something like: For Halloween let predictive text answer this question. Type “This Halloween I am haunted by..” and let predictive text give your answers. Without thinking, I typed in my answer (with no intention to post) and got, “I am haunted by my Mum and Dad.”

Wow! Not such a fun game.

It’s true too and I hate it. If you had told me three years ago that I would still be having some difficulties 18months after both parents had died I would never have believed you. I’m strong, determined, bloody minded and have realistic expectations about death. Parents dying in their seventies is normal. To be sad and miss them is normal. But here we are and some days I can barely function. I can’t sit still or be anywhere where I feel trapped.  My brain still can’t take too much noise or flashing lights (films can still be difficult) and my concentration is shot to pieces. It takes me four times as long to do anything and even then I have little confidence that I’ve done anything well. And all of this is made a million times worse if I spend any time in my parent’s house.  

The Long Suffering Husband looks at me, pityingly. He can see the toll it takes in my face. 

“Every time you go there you age about 20 years,” he says. 

Honestly, he’s such a gem.

My sister has recommended wearing a hat.

“It keeps it all in,” she says, “You look a bit silly but..”

I’m considering fashioning myself a little tin foil cap. It might help to keep the weird things that are happening in the world out too. 

But it just makes me cross with myself. Pull yourself together woman. It’s mind over matter. Don’t mind and it won’t matter. Then I switch and try to be kind to myself. What would I tell other people? I’d say it’s fine. Look after yourself, do whatever you need to. And therein lies the problem. When you need to do opposing things simultaneously it send you a bit bonkers.

I am currently in a phase of this extreme adulting malarkey where my parent’s house is sold. That’s great but it’s a very final step. There is light at the end of the tunnel. One day, soon, I will never have to go into the house again and maybe the holes in my brain can finally start to heal over. But before then comes the very difficult job of raking through their possessions. We did quite a lot of clearing before it went on the market. Clothes, lots of books, dvds, and some rubbish all went. The nice things, furniture and bits and bobs, we thought might have value, stayed. Now, we have the difficult job of sorting them out and let me tell you, this is a pretty shit thing to do.

You feel completely torn. You’d like to not have to look at it. Some people do this. They hire a skip and chuck everything in, or get a man with a van to come round and take everything. Whilst that is tempting, it’s something I find impossible. Other people take photos and list everything on Facebook sales, or take pieces to auction. Other’s give bits away. This explains why we have a hideous mirror and some glassware that isn’t to anyone’s taste. You don’t sell things because you need the money, it’s just that you can’t bear to think that your parent’s lives had no value.

When there is more than one sibling, this can also be tricky. What if you both want to keep the same things? What if there are things that neither of you actually want to own but you can’t face getting rid of? Whose loft has to groan with ornaments that your children will have to sort out when you go? What if one can’t face it and leaves it all to the other? Ultimately, though, you just need to look after each other. Your relationship is the most valuable of your parent’s possessions.

Over the years, I’ve tried to listen to things other people have said and not make the same mistakes. As death is such a big taboo in our society we don’t talk or listen and so we have no real idea of how we are meant to complete these tasks. I feel like our clearing is proving to be a very long and protracted process but maybe I just stopped listening when people talked about it.

Thanks for listening to my half term horror story. Let’s try the predictive text thing again - “I am haunted by my knitting.” That’s more like it.

Hamilton Hype or Honesty?

I finally went to see Hamilton.

People have been banging on about it for ages. The tickets were impossible to get, expensive and I’d never won the lottery (the Hamilton ticket lottery not the National one that acts as a subtle tax on poor people.) I wasn’t that convinced it could be as good as everyone said and I had avoided listening to the music because I’d heard that it was hip-hop, which is a genre I don’t really understand. I feared that the buzz around this show was just hype.

Then I got tickets for my birthday and we went on Monday.

Monday? You say, but it’s Saturday now. Why haven’t I blogged about it sooner?

The truth is, I’ve been speechless.

It’s not hype. This is the best musical. Honestly.

I say that as someone who saw Les Miserables in 1985, when everyone watching (except the critics) knew they’d seen something special. Hamilton, however, is better than that. It has everything: the songs are perfect, lyrical earworms, the dancing is amazing, the costumes fabulous, the story is historically accurate, the staging is stripped down to a perfect minimum, it’s clever, it’s funny and it is sad. Nothing is wasted. It will make you feel everything. I actually think it is a work of genius.

Nothing I write will do it justice, so I should probably not bother. Just go and see it for yourself and decide. If you do go, would you take me with you because I could watch it again tomorrow.

“Do de dooo. Dooby dooby doo de do”

I know I shouldn’t write anymore but here is a funny overheard in the toilet afterwards between a mum and her teenage daughter.
M: That was quite sad wasn’t it, at the end?
D: At the end?
M: Uh huh. What?
D: Not just the end. THE WHOLE SECOND HALF!
M: Really?
D: What about when his son died?
M: Oh yeah but I just found him annoying, so I was glad he died really.
D: Mum! Well it just makes me sad when children die and their parents have to live on without them. I don’t know why, it just that always makes me sad.