Camping

Do you like music? It's a broad question I know, a bit like, do you like language or do you like countries? The vast majority of us will appreciate an aspect of it and regularly listen to a form of it be it live or recorded. Others will learn to play an instrument, or use their voice, or fiddle about with decks and beat boxes or dustbin lids. And then there are those who are born with music deep within their veins; who live and breathe it and through music find their means of expression.

You're getting an education today reader.

I really like music, I enjoy listening to it and I also tinkle the ivories every now and again. When I was a youngster I got my grade two piano and since then me and Chopsticks have never looked back. I even write the odd tune, Camping & Vaginas being my most popular to date.

The thing is, and please don't tell anyone, but in my head I'm hearing Mozart and Chopin. Alas, when it comes out, my compositions amount to little more than Knees Up Mother Brown and variations thereof. That's NOT what I meant to say fingers. Camping & Vaginas for example was supposed to be Ruth E Dixon's Prelude Number 3 "Sunshine Summers" in C major. It's fair to say that, as it turned out, the two do not blend. The one I'm currently writing has a working title of Rainbows Sonata in E Minor. Unfortunately the emerging combination of the "Have A Banana" musical notation and the lyric "He's having me Shirley's salamied" renders the original thinking meaningless. There's no getting away from it, I am a cockney poet not an Austrian piano genius. I'm not even Elton flippin John.

In order to up my game, I've enrolled the help of Peter (my husband) to aid me with my music making. I have to say, I'm really pleased with his honky tonk. The kids are enjoying it too because the rhythmn appears to prompt the need, several times, to jump off the sofa and walk around the living room with bandy legs. Not quite the Royal Albert Hall experience I had hoped for, but "a happening" nonetheless. The one thing I have had to ban though is Peter naturally falling into playing Radiohead's song Codex after our practice (apparently it's in the same key as my tune). Hearing the two back-to-back, well....salt, wounds, rubbing into etc etc.

The truth is though that I am in awe of, and hugely grateful to, that rare breed who feed your soul with their gift of music. I've just finished reading a biography of the Cellist Jacqueline du Pre. I can only sit back and let her beautiful language soak me up. 

Jacqueline Du Pre - Elgar Concerto

A link to my Camping and Vaginas song off the back of Jacqueline Du Pre would require so much self harm and salt that an agonising death would be imminent (and, reader, I still have too much music "to give"). So for those who are interested, might I suggest you go to my website:-

Not Even Elton Flippin John

                                                   Doin' the Lambeth Walk. Oi!