They don't come along very often, so enjoy them when they do: perfect moments.
Breakfast Club this morning and we were thin on the ground, Tony and Terri being in London, but it was a misty-murky, cold autumnal morning; the kind that keeps early shoppers at home and makes for a quiet coffee bar filled with regular readers and with no screaming kids.
Nice.
Phil was reading the rugby pages of the sports section and I was deep in the book reviews, enjoying Virginia Woolf's criticism of Ulysses, smiling at her depiction of Joyce's masterpiece as : "… merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges."
One or other of this week's massed clone army of vaguely folky girl singers was murdering yet another Bob Dylan song in the background and I took the first sip of my second coffee.
Mmmmmmmm …
And suddenly it was 1970 …
Through the dross and out of the coffee shop speakers came - yes, really - the unmistakable sound of Joni singing Circle Game and one of those perfect moments hit me.
The grey world disappeared; the bright, sharp colours of the early seventies (replete with all the emotional baggage of early teendom) flooded over me and for at least half the song I just rode a wave of blissful contentment that only gradually faded.
I tried in vain to hang on to it but those moments are slippery and all too soon it wriggled free and escaped; the people walking past the window swam back into view and the song ended and Joni was replaced by yet another clone trying to sound like Jolie Holland or Regina Spektor; something that merely served to throw into sharp relief the dull, grey-beige soup of nothingness; the morass of worthless sludge that modern 'popular' music has become.
Thank you to whoever does the Pret playlist. More Joni and Bob please, and ditch the clones.
So now I'm home again, armed with a bagful of baby octopus and some crayfish tails and I've dug out my worn vinyl copy of "Ladies of the Canyon" and I'm going to lock the doors and shut out the grey world and wallow in nostalgia (and seafood) all day.
May your weekends contain at least one perfect moment.
8 comments:
It rained most of yesterday and all last night. I have some new black seed pods to show you, Dive, and yesterday was too dreary to take their picture. But this morning, ah, this morning was shiny like jewels ... sapphire and topaz and ruby and emerald. So bright and shiny and new. A perfect moment, too, I wished I could have shared with you. More black pods tomorrow, then.
Was it really a perfect moment or have you been smoking those black pods?
Why would I smoke black pods when I can, obviously, take myself there willy-nilly? Cheaper. Legal. And, hey, as I said, just a silly, uh, woman turned loose with a keyboard and a little camera.
I think we ought to use "willy-nilly" more often.
Yeh, and we'll have people sayin', "Criminy, not more 'will-nilly.'"
You sound more like an Englishwoman every day.
Well, it does make up half of my DNA.
Criminy!
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