It still staggers me to think that Rachel and I have been navigating life’s choppy currents together for twenty-two years at this point; a home, careers and a child, now almost an adult herself, and almost as old as I was when Rachel and I met, have all drifted by like so much of time’s flotsam, yet I’m still excited by all those things yet to come.
One of the major downsides to such busy lives, though, is the fact that we have, on this journey, so often been less like shipmates and more like those proverbial ships that pass in the night. When we met, Rachel was already working as a nurse, and I qualified as a teacher a few short years later: shift work and the regular school day (not to mention the irregular hours of marking and planning) make for a strangely syncopated life.
A quarter of a century of lifting, fetching, carrying, standing over medication trays and a million other daily tasks that our amazing NHS nurses carry out on a daily basis, took their toll, however, leading to Rachel’s sideways move off the wards and into a recent redeployment to a clinic setting: Monday-to-Friday, nine-till-five. Suddenly, after all those years, we found ourselves starting to trip into the same groove once again, keeping similar hours that have allowed many things to flourish such as those days when we could travel to or from work together, the hospital and school being in such close proximity, and, best of all, the realisation that we had weekends together again.
A list of possibilities long since forgotten have now been pulled sharply into focus once more and considered in turn. What about leisurely perusals through the Sunday papers? No, not these days. I tend to avoid the news as much as possible lately, shying away from all that negativity. What about a nice stroll before Sunday lunch? Absolutely; pencil that one in. But what to do with that earlier slot in the morning, that chunk of time before the walks, the lunches, the afternoon jigsaws and bouts of shed-pottering? There could only be one answer: the Sunday morning breakfast.
I love Sunday morning breakfasts, and my mind was soon tripping excitedly over such possibilities as scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, Welsh rarebit and any number of other tasty morsels with which I would soon be reacquainting myself. Here, though, is where another problem began to rear its head. What would be the soundtrack to my breakfast preparations? The correct soundtrack is essential to any such activity; this time together was a gift, and the wrong score would surely ruin it before it had even begun, so where to turn?
Rock was surely out of the question, as were the Blues and any sort of country. They should all be reserved for those drink-in-the-hand, toe-tapping evenings. Pop? I’m no fan of modern music, but I do like the pop music produced between the 60s and the 90s. This, though, tended to be the reserve of gardening sessions in which the trimming, sweeping, weeding and planting all needed hastening along by a catchy beat. Even classical music didn’t seem to fit, its often lyric-less calm being far more fitting for summer days in the garden feeling the sun beating down on closed, daydreamy eyelids.
I was almost at the point of giving up when it struck me, and a quick scan through the internet saw me arrive at a YouTube channel filled with American classic songs from that golden period between the 1930s and 1960s, from the likes of Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby all the way back to The Inkspots and Fred Astaire.
Finally, here was the music I’d been looking (or should that be listening?) for! These songs spoke of a quieter time, a slower time, when people actually took tea breaks and lunch breaks at work, cherished the weekend and didn’t need to feel connected to the outside world on a 24/7 basis. They contained lyrics about what now seem such quaint notions as romance, the value of home and the slow slide of the seasons, each into the next, an ideal accompaniment to those quiet moments in which I now “…slip me a slug from the wonderful mug”, lean back, let the bacon sizzle a little while longer and soak up another musical Sunday morning.
Let’s turn that volume up another notch, shall we?
