I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace, but it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…
Music
Music pervades and has always pervaded my life to such an extent that I am not aware of its centrality but from the few records that my parents possessed (including a 78 rpm record of Elvis Presley’s Blue Suede Shoes), to learning the violin at school, to progressively listening to Radio Luxembourg and Radio Caroline on a valve radio to the ease of access that Spotify and You Tube give us to much of all recorded music, I love not just the music but the musicology – the family tree and genetics of music. I gave up the violin for the guitar and the guitar for the ukulele (more of that later), I have sung in choirs from Mozart’s requiem to Dylan – I can’t imagine living without music. On the days when I go to work, I listen to the morning news radio but on the way home I listen to music…
Two musical games of my own invention that you might enjoy…
1. Music Associations
Ideal on a long journey – you play word association but with the title or a line from a song and anyone can challenge a player to explain the connection and if all the other players agree that the connection is valid, the challenged gains a point but if the challenge fails then the challenger loses a point. an example of the chain might be:- Heart like a Wheel – Little Red Corvette (cars have wheels) – Little Red Rooster – Wake up in the Morning etc. Connections could be word associations but they could be deeper – composer, covered by the previous singer – the possibilities are endless…
2. Hit or a Miss (Juke Box Jury)
Juke Box Jury was an early panel show on British TV in which the host, David Jacobs, played the latest pop songs to a panel of guests who were then invited to vote it – Hit or a Miss! With a group of friends, two people at a time play three random songs from a playlist of their own favourites one at a time and everybody else votes on each song as Hit or Miss and the winner is the one with the most hits. Each person may choose the starting song, but then the playlist must be set to Shuffle for the next two songs. My music choices are so eclectic, I couldn’t possibly choose favourite music but to give you a taste, here are three pieces from my largest playlist on Spotify chosen according to the rules of the game…
Sweet Dreams – Bettye Swanne
Breath Again – Åsa
You Do Something To Me – Sinead O’Connor
Well, with 71 hours and 9 minutes of music to choose from – those surprised me too, especially the second choice but that’s the fun of the game!
Murals
My signwriting days will have to wait till the letter “S” but following the car accident which broke my hip in 1999, I was unable to work up ladders in the way I did before and although I started teaching part-time at Sligo Institute of Technology, I also got a couple of mural commissions which I did with I did with my friend Rob Forrester. They were possible to do using lifting platforms or cherry-pickers, obviating ladders. In fact one of the first important jobs I did after moving to Ireland was a mural for a bookshop called The Winding Stair after a poem by the Sligo poet, WB Yeats. The owner already had a successful shop of the same name on the banks of the Liffey in Dublin and had been waiting for some years to get suitable premises in Sligo. Kevin gave me considerable licence in designing the mural, and it served as a great advertisement for me which everybody knew. Here you can see a news item on RTE – the Irish TV, which features a much younger me painting the mural…
Memories – A Poetic Interlude
House with No Plan
The plan of my mind palace
does not exist
I haven’t tried to
master my memories
in that way
but instead I wander
through the corridors
opening doors not quite at random
and relying on my
innate sense of direction
to find my way back
out of the labyrinth.
So sometimes I arrive
in pleasant pieces of the past
and sometimes in rooms
I would rather not visit
their contents not yet
come to terms with or
understood in the scheme of things
Nobody else can follow me here
so I needn’t draw the map out
with notes in the margin
“Here be monsters!”
only I need to know
the rooms best avoided
or put on the long finger to explore
yet sometimes my mental map
lets me down and I find myself
lost and shivering, stuck
in the darker places
searching for meaning
© Andrew Wilson, 2024
