I Would Have Liked Me A Lot Last Night…

There’s only a week to go now and this will be over. We’ll have rehearsed, played our two gigs and Neil will be packing to go back to Australia. I’ll make my final post to this blog and will attempt to fill the considerable space that all of this has taken up these last few months. By then I’ll have written 36 posts sketching out what it was like joining, nurturing and ending a band, then revisiting it a quarter of a century later. At the start of this year I was afraid to let anyone read my work; now my musings on the band have recieved over 3,500 page views – small beans to many bloggers but a big deal to me – and I’m commited to continuing to write.

I’d already begun a blog and had posted a couple of pieces before I became somewhat consumed by the reunion project. It became clear very quickly that I wouldn’t have the headspace or concentration to write about anything else and anyway, it was such a great opportunity to explore in detail what this really meant. So I shelved my shiny new blog and set up justwordsandmusic instead. That’s how it had started, just words and music – the two things that took us on such an incredible journey. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter to me so much whether anyone else likes the music and the words, they gave us opportunities some only dream of and are still relevant to us today.

During these last few months the grass has grown long, ivy has found its way into the loft and ants have made an incursion into the kitchen. But I’ve still done my best to be a good mother, lover, daughter and friend. It takes energy, though, to do this, to poke around in the darkest recesses of memory to recall not the names, the places and the events, but the feelings. It has taken a degree of courage too – these were dark times in some respects – but I’ve survived and understand myself better now.

I’ll never be a great singer or a confident performer, but when the potion has all the right ingredients I change, as if through some sort of shamanistic ritual. Unthinking, unplanned, unrestrained. I suppose it was a form of therapy for me when we began, 26 years ago. Now it has confirmed what I always suspected; that time does not matter, it’s what we do with our time that really counts. Growing older might be an inconvenience, a pain, but it doesn’t have to mean a dulling of the spirit. The wildness can live on…being brave enough to revisit our younger, dafter selves and cutting the grass need not be mutually exclusive.

I’ll miss writing about the band terribly, just as I’ll miss them. Even though we’ve spent little time together we are in each other’s thoughts but that will fade again, I’m sure. I’ll put the velvet outfits that didn’t make it on stage back on eBay. The amp will be hauled into the loft. And you’ll forget about this twice weekly peep through the keyhole at my life.

I can’t remember the last time I cried – not from sadness – but I know it will come. The precious jewel will be replaced in the box and sealed up. Such a fragile, beautiful thing it is that we created, but the truth is, we might never see it again…

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