65 # 4 Sonder

Sonder is a word which defines the idea that everyone we encounter in life are leading lives as vivid and as complex as our own; lives populated by visions and hopes and friends and the inherent agency of love and lovers and families and dreams and desires. Pondering this while looking back on what you know of your own mother’s life is fraught with its own problems. Do we ever really know our parents or our children? Or indeed that of our friends and lovers? And yet it’s hard to escape the influence and impact they had and continue to have on our lives.  Its with this in mind that I ponder the life of this young woman, pictured left. Born in 1933 and so I reckon this must have been taken around 1950-ish, sitting on the cusp between teen and womanhood. Before she was married, before I was born, because she was 21 and I was a honeymoon baby - 9 months and a day after their wedding. Such memories I hold of her, and yet this period reveals nothing except the joy of the moment - I'm reading a pony and candy floss. It could be Portobello and the beach, or equally the miner's gala or some other such fair. But she looks happy and I remember this look from my own childhood. Its nice to reflect. It is said Harry Houdini grew up as a witness to his own father’s failings, a man who was always haunted by the shadow of his own past. Yet evading that past was probably Houdini’s greatest escape, as he guided himself into the culture of the new world that had left his father so disappointed. We all escape our own pasts to some degree because we all move on - and its what we want for our own children, is it not? I suspect Houdini's father would have been proud of his boy. One of the things that has helped me to move on is music, which I have a passion for. And today we can grab this out of the ether. Take a moment and listen - I have tried in vain to translate it, but does it really need that because its just lovely. Take time to sonder about the people in your life.

65 # 3 Happy New Year

And that's the end of that and the start of this. The first decade of the twenty-first century has gone and now we are into the roaring 20s - bring it on I say. I'm not sure how to gauge the success of a decade, or compare one with another because the ups and downs seem to even out - thank goodness. And that's how it seems to have gone for me. But I guess I'm hitting the final third of my life. Some might say that's optimistic but hey, what's wrong with optimism? Many's a guid tune frae an auld fiddle, and all that. So what will the new decade bring? Well this month I will be recording - just waiting for my new mixer to come, as well as tidying up the space I use as a studio (in the attic), which I will do today. But I have a plan to record a themed record, bunching songs together - and they have been written that way, though not necessarily intentionally. Its just the way they have come out. But I am looking forward to it. So a month at a time is just fine - and maybe I'll even take a drive and listen to this: