Not my Lorna Doones!

"Dancing to this record will give you an agile body and healthy mind, but it won't be easy.” – Stewart Copeland

Getting to sleep was difficult last night. For some reason I had two mental itches that couldn’t be reached by the Backscratcher of the mind. I can find no reason for either of them, each having arrived fully-formed in that strange cache-memory that lives between the serious storage and the scratch-pad.

The first was whether there is anything that human beings have three of. I do of course mean standard models rather than those with various “issues” regarding extremity counts. I of course have slightly more than the average number of legs but I am not sure whether that means anything. I did think of cervical vertebrae but there are seven of them – an odd number it’s true but not three which in a way is a bit like the difference between 3/4 time – a common signature and reasonably easy to dance to – and 7/4 time which is only for Jazz people – nice – but not danceable at all. Let me know if you think of anything but I want proper things, not collections or sub-divisions such as “lobes of the liver”.

Second annoyance was a tune – “you’re moving out today” by Carole Bayer Sager which my sister used to play over and over almost to the point of auto-defenestration. What made it stranger than the normal repeating pop tune was the weirdness of the whole thing. The lyrics are such a mix-up of things, items that the boyfriend has and have to go with him, his strange apologies which suggest he is simple, like an animal stuck in a cage responding with repeating odd behaviour. I suspect that this was a real relationship; that all those things are the genuine detritus of the couple’s year together. It seems to have enough of a window on life as to be able to spawn a whole drama/sitcom. What also helps is the fact that Carole Bayer Sager has not got a bell-clear singing voice – she whines, making it easier to believe for some reason, that she might not be entirely blameless in all this. But he ain’t Burt Bacharach.

A Book of Trees and Weather – 1929

The world collapsed in 1988,
When all those widow-weeded,
Nineteen-year-old business women,
Danced their sneaker dance,
And fell to dust unbidden at my feet.
In that double luckless year,
Something broke or changed,
A steel horizon made itself.
I went to write in Eden,
A garden drained of spirit,
Became a simple shelter
From the cold and rain,
And all the world was deathly,
Chemical and white,
Like children’s ghosts,
For video and takeaway
Have taken everything,
And trashed it casually.

Those figures seen through water,
Are lost forever in black tides,
Stretched and danced to vapour,
And the acid cut of alcohol
Is gone, lost with every method
For the pleasures of this life.
I knew all things before this,
Spoke French and German
Enough to fail at both.