Gratitude: Day Five

I had a great big gratitude ready to go and then I went home and got cross and refused to write it. There it was, waiting for me, ready to make my life better and improve my mental health and lift my well-being and all the things that gratitude does and I absolutely stuck my toes in. 

The fourteen-year-old in me came out. She was bolshy and oddly inconsolable. She has a sort of despair, which I think her contemporary counterparts sometimes have, about the world. She is superteen and hormones all over the shop and everything in black and white and all extremes flying. I’m not sure that I was quite like that when I was fourteen, but my inner teenager is like that. 

She also loves a bit of self-sabotage. So instead of doing work and good things like this gratitude list, I sat up all night furiously reading Jon Ronson’s book about internet shaming. It’s a brilliant book, but I have read it before and it’s not exactly designed to spread peace and light. It shines it torch into the dark side of human nature, and I finally went to bed convinced that we are all going to hell in a handcart.

Because of all that, I’m writing this a day late. I’m calmer now, and I can remember the gratitude thing with a more settled mind. I was grateful for coincidence, and for serendipity, and for memory. 

I had to go to the feed place to get the horses all their delightful food. (I think I’m grateful for that too - to have a wonderful horse shop a charming seven-minute drive away. It’s such a pretty road and the people in the shop are kind and helpful.) I put on Radio Two, because it was the time of day when there is nothing good on Radio Four. I only rarely listen to Radio Two and, at the very moment I turned the dial, there was one of the great, iconic songs of my childhood.

It’s such a funny song, and it’s such an unexpected song, and it’s a song I had completely forgotten about. It’s a man called Gary Shearston doing a cover version of I Get a Kick Out of You. Why did we all love it so much, when I was seven? It’s madly seventies, with a terrific violin section and a bit of cello, and a boom boom boom of percussion after the last chorus. Shearston, whom I had never heard of before, and have never heard of since, was doing that kind of can’t sing singing that was very fashionable then, in the Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan manner. The emphasis on certain syllables is hysterical. ‘I get no kick from coc-AYNE’ he sings, obviously having a ball.

The drawing room of my youth flooded back. That was where we used to listen to music and sing and dance. It’s where my father used to play his tea-chest, and where his friends, Jimmy and Perce, used to come and play the guitar with him. It’s where the parties used to happen, every Saturday night, when everyone from the racing world would roar up in their cars and carouse into the night. I used to creep down in my dressing gown and watch them all, and take a secret sip out of wine glasses left on the low, walnut tables. 

There was so much music in my childhood. Bands and musicians would roll up. There was always someone from the Clancy Brothers or The Dubliners or The Seekers. An outfit called The Springfield Revival used to appear, very young and very beautiful, and I fell hopelessly in love with their willowy singer, who was tall and slender and had a smile that could light up the room. There was a serene, shy woman called Paddy Grey who was one of the only people who could bring the crowds in the house to hushed, pin-drop silence, her voice was so mesmerising. And when there were not people playing, Mum would open up the old gramophone and get out all the 45s and act as an extremely elegant disc jockey.

How lovely it is, to remember all that. And all from one chance song on the car radio, which I only heard because I was running fifteen minutes late to go and get the feed. The world does send its gifts, even when the times feel turbulent. I’m glad that I’ve decided to write them down.