Ooh Ooh

Got to get a minute got to get you on your own

Your baby sisters sleeping and your daddy’s on the phone

Gentle music, rock away the sadnesses in me

The view from the uppermost windows is of a silver landscape, fields smoothed with a white sheet, and the tops of the trees touched with a shiny paintbrush. Its brighter than daylight. You could walk anywhere.

There is still something missing.

 

“Everybody else has gone

But you’re still here with me

All the world is sleeping by and by

Through the windowpane

The frosted light is streaming in

Full moon sailing high across the sky”

Today

Let us sleep now…

All this useless beauty

7.30am The glare of lights in the layby.  Three more weeks and a neatly packed wooden crate of items has been upended and they are spread across the room.

Current listening: Bon Iver “Wisconsin”

“For Emma For Ever Ago”  is up there at the top of the favourite records of the year for me next to “Sun Giant” and “Ark 1″. This is the b-side to the recently released “For Emma” single and I can’t believe that he left it off the album because it fits in there perfectly. World weary and intimate and beautiful and feeling like a walk through a leafless forest with twigs and branches underfoot. I gather that Wisconsin is his home state.  The album is so beautiful. Another of those great records that don’t give up their secrets immediately. Five or six listens at least to get there.

Life can be so nice

Still fully dark at 6am: 1st October 2008

First frost of the year: 6th October 2008. Windscreen scraping time.

The owls haven’t even started their dawn hooting at 6am these days but by about 6.20 they are making themselves heard. Rather than resent the first frost I really relish it. There is something entirely magical about the crunch of grass underfoot and the wisps of cream and pink flecking the sky in the east and gradually lightening the whole of the big sky which is visible out from the top of the hills.  The view of the eastern plain at 7.50am on Monday on the way down through Pant Glas was just spectacular. A sea of pink mist with the trees and woods poking up out of it in layers going back and back to the horizon for 30 miles. It was one of those nothing gets better than this moments. Unfortunately we were on the way to the station so couldn’t stop and ten minutes later some of the magic had dissipated but the  fact that such views are so fleeting make them even more precious.

Current listening: Bella Hardy “Young Edmund”

Wow. Amazing. Bella Hardy was on the Folk at the Proms on the telly and BBC Radio 3 yesterday. And about time too. She got a bit of support from Mike Harding last year but not as much coverage as she should have done. Her album was one of my favourite Christmas presents of last year. And her home is just across the yard from my sisters house. So the album has been getting further airings since yesterday. I do hope this results in even more success. She is playing the folk festival circuit later in the summer so I should catch her live then.  Bellowhead were fucking ace as well. As usual.

Today (Three days ago in fact)

Heading down the garden first thing on Saturday morning to collect eggs and feed chickens, dampness still in the air but the morning filled with the brightness of a sun already risen and just about to make its presence known above the trees of neighbouring gardens.  Four screeching black slashes in the air screamed past about  five metres above my head.  The first swallows of the year.  I saw a single swift above the fields on the way home from work over a week ago but this was the first sighting on home territory. A heartlifting way to start a bank holiday weekend and a definite signal that summer is on it’s way if not already here. I still wonder at the fact that these small birds were hawking across the skies above African plains and deserts just weeks, in fact days ago. By Sunday evening the skies above my house were filled with tens of them, now a fixture until at least early September.

And further evidence by the way that the beech hedge immediately in front of the house on Thursday of last week was still completely covered in last years crisp brown leaves but by Sunday morning had been reclothed with the luminous lime green glow of the new season. The freshness of the trees and plants at this time of year is hard thing to beat for lifting the spirits.

 

Current Listening: Leonard Cohen “Who By Fire”

Listening to Leonard is so depressing.

You can’t help but reflect upon how inarticulate and untalented and imperfect 99.9 % of other poets and musicians are. Maybe apart from Bobby Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

Mind you it’s music for the head isn’t it and there always has to be music for the feet to complement that. 

Bring on Rodgers Edwards.

 

Shuffleathon 2007. Part 9

Norma Waterson – Reply to Joe Haines

Joe Haines was a journalist who wrote, to quote the sleeve notes, “an iniquitous article …on the subject of Freddie Mercury’s disclosure that he was HIV positive (indeed that he had full blown AIDS) and which the Daily Mirror saw fit to print”.

This is a song written by Norma’s late sister Lal, all of whose songs were some of the most beautiful skewed lullabies written in the last fifty years. Occupying a middle ground of somehere between Syd Barrett, rural English folk and Leonard Cohen, if that can be imagined. There are far too few of them but those that there are are shining gems.

Norma Waterson does of course have one of the great voices of our age and of any age. Shes a modern day living breathing Piaf or Caruso and I wish more people would see it.

A sad song but very beautiful.