Sandra

CPL 593H

Published on September 2, 20121 Comment

I’m slightly too young to have known Roxy Music as anything else but that band wot did “Avalon” or not think of Bryan Ferry as an aging creepster, but Sandra had been just the right age for glam rock in general and Roxy in particular. Roxy was the first great band of her generation, some years before punk, coming from but not actually having been a part of the whole hippie/psychedalic rock movement. Did you realise they’re forty years old this year?

Yes, I know. A couple of decades and all those small differences between rock movements aren’t all that important anymore but to music nerds, which Sandra never was. That sort of obsessive compulsiveness cataloging and categorising is usually more of a male pursuit anyway (certainly was in our hosuehold). She just liked the music that she liked, had a keen sense of why she liked certain bands or genres, but no desire to become all stamp collecting about it…

And this was her favourite Roxy Music song.

Trains to Brazil

Published on August 29, 2012Leave a comment

Best song the Guillemots ever did; pretty good for a largely annoying hipster band, as it captured the mood of the UK after 7/7 and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. At the time I was working at a small startup where I could listen to 6usic all day and this came up loads of times in late 2005/early 2006. That was also around the time Sandra and I bought our house and before her health problems had gotten the worst of her. In retrospect one of the happier times of our lives and this fits that so well: uplifting melody, bitter sweet lyrics, a simple recipe deftly executed.

Two years ago today

Published on August 24, 2012Leave a comment

Eight months

Published on July 7, 2012Leave a comment

So last night I came home completely stressed out, you know, with that feeling in the back of your throat as if you’d been screaming all day, heart racing so fast I thought I’d get a heart attack. At first I thought it was just a side effect of having had a busy week at work, what with everybody else on holiday, but it hadn’t been that busy or stressfull. It was only when I looked at the calendar this morning that realised what was really behind it: today it’s been eight months since Sandra died.

It’s funny. In everyday life, at work, I can hide my grief so well I largely forget it myself, but it only takes one small thing to get it back. For some reason the local supermarket has been a reliable trigger: one moment you’re looking at the frozen peas, the other caught in an ineffable melancholy. At home everything reminds me of her of course so that’s no refuge either. But it doesn’t really matter where I am; Sandra is inside of me and her memory comes back at any unguarded moment. This is not necessarily a sad thing, but the grief is still stronger than the joy of the memory.

What’s still haunting me is the anxiety of the last two years, the constant worry about whether the worst will happen and how. Now that the worst has happened, the anxiety is still there, only slowly disappearing, like land rebounding after an ice age.

So what I notice is that I still haven’t gotten some of my sharpness, my drive back, still am wondering what to do with the rest of my life now that she is gone. Which sounds like something out of a romantic, sombre pop ballad, but in real life isn’t very good to find yourself in.

Quoted for Truth: Nicolas Freeling, Criminal Conversation

Published on June 26, 2012Leave a comment

Nicolas Freeling’s hero, inspector Van der Valk of the Amsterdam recherche, meets up with a woman who might have been blackmailed and gives a short description:

She was a solid, well-constructed woman, not fat at all but all curves, with the very fine-textured, pearly skin that goes so well with dark chestnut hair. Small good teeth, quite rare in Holland, where the women have excellent teeth looking like a well-polished row of marble gravestones.

From 1965, but as Sandra often noticed, Dutch women, especially young Dutch women, do tend to have huge perfect white teeth, though her comparison was more to do with horses than marble gravestones. A very Dutch mouth that.

I love Nicolas Freeling’s mysteries, another writer Sandra turned me on to, as he has a knack for getting Dutch people right: his Holland is one that’s still a ways behind the modern world, though getting there, a Holland gone some time I was born, but one I still recognised if only from period fiction.