Aelph’s Soaring Moment!

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/coincidence/

Last Friday, my friend, Aelph Edgewood (http://aelph.weebly.com/), and I went down to the King Arthur pub to see Earth Reggae/Conscious Roots band, Sunny and Ed Davidson (SunnyandEdDavidson.com), play.

They were great, really brilliant to dance to – and a most personable pair of lads too. Helen, their fiddle-player, was magnificent, as was their drummer (whose name I stupidly failed to ask).

The vibe was excellent and several of us got up on the small space between technical equipment and stage and boogied frenetically: very good fun.

But, for me – and, I suspect, for most of the assembled music-lovers – the best bit came at the end, when Sunny and Ed asked if anyone wanted to come and sing with them for their final number.

Aelph, who is a superb musician and composer, was up there in two shakes of a marmoset’s tail – and, microphone in hand, launched into a wonderful and spontaneous accompaniment to the song. It was really powerful and primal: Forceful female energy expressed in lionesque sounds; haunting notes crooned; deep jungle rhythms reminiscent of the beat of the Earth Mother’s heart – and all perfectly matched to the tune sung by the band.

I attempted to video this tour de force – but, unfortunately, my abilities in this direction match those associated with Mathematics and Geography (bottom of the class job, in other words) – and, though my heart was in the right place, my finger on the Blackberry most certainly was not!

But it was fantastic to see a close friend shine in this way; to see her abundant talent displayed in front of others and, quite rightly, appreciated hugely. It was also lovely to see her proudly wearing one of her own beautiful designs (made into leggings among many other things).

Coincidence? No! I feel that Aelph’s moment on stage was meant to happen!

1974 Disco: The Journal Entry

As some of you will be aware, I had a fantastic, and unexpected, day at the Towersey Festival, near Thame, on Friday:

https://orangehairedalienorabrowning.wordpress.com/2016/08/27/towersey-festival-near-thame/

Aren’t life’s coincidences amazing? If, indeed, there is such a thing as coincidence (a subject for another post, methinks!)…

So, here is the part of the Festival Experience I chose not to share on here instantly: Amongst the group of friends we met up with at Venue 65 (the big tent which hosted the big acts like Kate Rusby and Billy Bragg) was one, whom I shall call James. He and his wife, Joanna, are people I have known slightly for a couple of years now. But, by all weird and serendipitous happenings, I went to school with James’ sister, Louisa. Not only that, we were good friends back in the mid seventies.

Seeing James at the Festival triggered a memory I had forgotten for over forty years. Back in 1974, Louisa, our friend Caroline and I started going to discos together. We were all sixteen, coming up to our O’ level exams – and, more to the point, a stewing froth of hormones! Pretty much bereft of sexual experience (a snog was shocking enough back in the day), we wanted and we didn’t want; we teased and then backed off; we sat on slightly older boys’ laps and shared their cigarettes and danced wildly with them – but, when the tentacle-like arms snaked round our womanly bits on the way back, we shied like startled palominos and galloped off home!

Normal stage of the Mating Game, in other words!

This one particular time, both Louisa and I ‘pulled’ as the saying goes – and spent much of the evening snogging our respective youths in dark corners (like you do!) and allowing them the odd gropelet at the outlying areas. Mine was called Dave (the bloke, not the outlying area, you understand!).

How, you may ask – possibly with an additional ‘the hell’! – do you remember that detail?

Easy! My forty-four year diary-writing habit has, finally, paid off! All I had to do was to locate the April 28th – May 23rd (I was an anal retentive back then too!) volume – a tiny red Memo Book – and flick through it and, stone the crows, there it all was in faded blue biro, dated Monday 20th May.

But – and this is the bit I recalled so suddenly and told James – there is an entry written by Louisa! Her commentary upon my activities the night before is as clear as clear can be!

What touches  me now is how incredibly innocent we were for sixteen year old girls. Perhaps it was partly because we went to an all girls’ Grammar School. Perhaps the decade we became teens in. Who knows?

But, for us, back in Spring 1974, sex was boys called Dave and wandering hands and long snogs and guiltily-smoked fags and daring half pints of beer! And, for me, two pop songs (as we called them then) are forever associated with this dawning of sexual awareness phase: ‘Waterloo’ by Abba, and ‘This Town ain’t big enough for the both of us’ by Sparks.

These days I dance like a Berzerker on Speed (gaily knocking over small children, tables and pints of beer); even then, I was, shall we say, enthusiastic on the dance floor – but I can still get a rise out of the tunes mentioned above, especially the latter.

We must have driven these poor randy (horny) swains mad with our ducking and diving, our pores exuding, ‘Yes, please!’ and our mouths forming the negative. Untried though we were, even we could inhale the heady aroma of sexual arousal and know it for what it was. But we were frightened: The moral tales, the religious upbringing, the fear of pregnancy, the fear of being seen as cheap and easy – the overwhelming ‘Good Girls Don’t’ label which affixed itself to us even when our bodies were telling us something very different – all conspired to keep many of us virgins until our late teens.

I would love to contact Louisa and show her the words she wrote forty-two years and three months ago. I wonder if she would be transported back to the immediacy of it all the way I was?

Marriage, or a permanent partner, protects you from this kind of thing, doesn’t it? Unless, of course, you are a Wandering Sexual Minstrel, singing your ballads at the foot of anyone’s window! When in a long-term relationship, you don’t have to worry about how far to go on a first date and all that malarkey.

But, now divorced, I am, technically, back in the market – which is a bloody weird feeling, let me tell you. I have no current wish to get back in the saddle, as it were – neigh, neigh! – but, if I did, I suspect the terror and wonder I experienced as an unknowing sixteen year old would not have changed in any substantial way.

I would still be torn between excitement and gut-roiling fear!

The truth is very simple: Even back then, I was a fierce and wild bird in my natural state – and, for all that the dawn of sexual awareness was red and rosy, I didn’t want to be caught and tamed in the process.

Still don’t!