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Part Six In the autumn of the year 2000, I became quite friendly with a girl called Alice, who worked at the Griffin, the pub that had become synonymous with my life. Via an oddly complicated set of circumstances, one night led to me going to her house in need of some kind of emotional support – I recall standing in my lounge after something had occurred, needing to talk to somebody. Until this moment, I’d never felt in need of somebody else, but at that moment, I did. And Alice lived just around the corner, and as we were friends and I knew she’d understand (and she did), I felt that I could talk to her about it. So I went round, and we chatted, and things seemed better already. Maybe it was this moment, maybe it was later – I fear the passage of time has dulled my brain too much to recall if this was the night that I stayed with her overnight, or whether such an occurrence was a few weeks later. Suffice to say, as autumn slowly trickled into winter, Alice and I had begun some kind of liaison. I say ‘liaison’, simply because I can’t really explain what we were when we were together. Alice is gay, and so I could never say that her and I were ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’. Yet we had something between us that transcended merely being close friends. It’s difficult, bordering on the impossible, to explain exactly what happened between us, suffice to say it never actually became a fully fledged sexual relationship, yet I know I was in love with her, and that there were some loving feelings from her towards me. We had something going on, and it was the most wonderful thing I’d experienced in years. Maybe this is some rose-tinted spectacles perspective upon things – I know that over the Christmas period of 2000, we were very close, yet New Years Eve, she was concerned about what we had going on. I also know that over the period of her exams that followed in January of 2001, we’d agreed that the premise of me sleeping at her house had to end – partly because of her need to revise, but also because this ‘thing’ we had going on had no way of continuing. I was sanguine about it, as I had been for the couple of months prior to Christmas. I knew that it had no way of perpetuating in any kind of long-term way, and yet… and yet… it was so wonderful. I’d never ‘clicked’ with anybody in this way before, and frankly I don’t think I ever have since. I was writing again, of course. A song called I Could Be A Lover was inspired by Alice and musically based upon a new found love of the band James – it is, without being overly self-absorbed, a great tune, and a rare example of me writing an up tempo, rocking tune. It’s an even rarer example of me being optimistic, and pointing out the failings in my life, too.
Alice’s exams came, and went. Despite everything, we were still… whatever we were. I stayed at her house, we worked together, we went out together, and we had a splendid time. There’s a whole series of books to be written about everything we did, the good times, the bad times, the occasions we sat on swings in a nearby park, the times we cried, and laughed, and drank, and all sorts of everything. There were occasionally moments of unhappiness, I can’t deny that, but we had something together that I’ve never had before or since – we weren’t a couple… we couldn’t be a couple, but I guess that we were something. I could say we were in love without being lovers, except that sounds ridiculously pretentious… yet I somehow like that as a definition, if such things have to be defined. Over the latter part of the winter, and early spring, of 2001, I found my last great group of songs, and they became a reality. As had become customary, they were songs that had both lyrics and music penned by myself, and as well as I Could Be A Lover, Easy Circles, Sideshow, and Freedom And Sweetness Exist appeared. A couple of them were inspired by what was happening between me and Alice, and also by a period of my life that I look upon now as quite an exciting and happy time for a variety of reasons. But there’s one other one that I haven’t yet mentioned called Thanks For Something. It was a crappy conceit that led to the song’s existence – I rarely write a song from the title downwards, yet I wanted to write something that was a happy antidote to the phrase "Thanks for nothing". Thus, with the happiness that I felt from being close to Alice, and with the addition of a first verse and a few ideas that I’d written several months previously, a song came forth. With hindsight, the phrase "Thanks for something" sounds a little caustic, almost as if it’s meant to sound as unkind as its paradoxical inspiration. But the song of the same name isn’t meant that way. It is, in its own way, the most honest and happy thing I’ve ever written – and the whole feeling of the song came from me being as happy as I’d ever been – and it was down to Alice. Respect to her. THANKS FOR SOMETHING
Maybe looking back at the past, one always feels such things, but I really feel that those early months of the year 2001 were some of the happiest times I’ve ever had. And even throughout some rather stressful events that occurred elsewhere, with other friends of ours, and their respective lives and difficulties, Alice and I remained in the state of togetherness, for want of a better word that we had been in for several months. Of course, such tenuous things, no matter how wonderful, can’t last forever. In the summer of 2001, as the University year finished, Alice left Loughborough to go and work in Tan Troed, in Wales, for the PGL group, who provide holidays for children. I knew it was coming, and yet when it finally occurred, and she departed, I was absolutely gutted. I’ll never forget the details of the Sunday night before, and the Monday morning she actually left. It was a heartache for both of us, and a full stop in whatever our relationship was – things would never be the same again. I missed her terribly – I wrote a song, in the bar at Crewe railway station, as it happens - called Love Like Shelter. It was never quite completed, and although when I later wrote the music for it, it came marvellously alive, the lyrics lacked that certain something, in that they couldn’t really ever explain how I felt, although the chorus had a damn good go at it.
That was the summer of 2001 – that was then. Alice came back in the autumn to finish her degree, and although we were never as intimate as we had been before, we were still good friends, and although there were one or two emotional moments in the next few months, our friendship survived. And I’m delighted to say that it still does to this day. She is a very special person to me, and always will be. Nowadays, she lives many miles away, and although we’re still in touch, via text messaging, the Internet, and even the occasional meeting in person, it isn’t the same as it used to be. I miss her. I miss us.
EPILOGUE And what of the songs since then? Well, there have been some, but the last two years or so have been more bereft than any period beforehand. Many things have occurred, and many people have kick-started my emotions, but I fear that the pitifully few efforts of the years 2002 and 2003 are perhaps left unpublished. More and more, I seemed to find myself finding great tunes on the guitar, but failing to find any appropriate lyrics to match them. It is only in the early months of this year, of 2004, that I have finally started writing lyrics again. Meeting somebody whom I was very close with a decade ago, and the possibility of rekindling old fires, has, in its own way, started me writing words again. Recently, I completed a song called "So Madeleine" - I’m not sure of its merits, as compared to some of the things I’ve written over the course of my life, but it’s a new song, it has words, and a tune, and, it’s written, as all the best things are, from the heart. Perhaps irrelevantly, it’s rather catchy, and whether anything transpires from the situation that has arisen that prompted me to write in the first place, it’s been utterly wonderful to find that I can still find a way to express myself musically about the things that occur in my life. Which is why I can still call myself a songwriter, after all these years.
THE END
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8th March 2004 |
