R.E.M., MASCARA AND UMBRELLA HATS

They do say that music transports you, but it wasn’t until I was driving around in the early morning sunshine of a recent December day that I honestly truly began to believe it. For many of the usual reasons, given the season, I had decided to book myself a day off in order to trudge around the remaining shops of our nearest large town and make a few token gestures in the general direction of gift giving which appears to be the fashionable thing to do around this time of the year.

Behind me the sun shone brightly if a little more low in the sky than was comfortable, and ahead of me the dark storm clouds were gathering in order to give me a bit of a soaking as I went about my business of squandering my gotten gains on fripperies and baubles of an unexciting and ultimately no doubt scornable nature. This juxtaposition of weather events caused the almost complete arch of a rainbow to form just in front of me and all seemed well with the world as I sat in a lengthy queue of traffic, most of which was, unlike myself, off in the pursuit of a day’s honest toil.

I myself was already far too early for the shops to be opening and was anticipating finding a space, popping my pound coins into the machine and finding that I had wasted my money on waiting time that was useless to me in my aims of retail therapy, so the delay, for once, did not concern me unduly. There’s something about a queue of traffic that seems somehow less awful if you are not actually in a hurry yourself or don’t have an appointment that is becoming imminently pressing that all of the other vehicles are preventing you from reaching with any hope of punctuality.

As the rain began to splatter and patter upon my metal cocoon, I noticed a crowd of schoolchildren eagerly making their way to school. I was, after all, driving (or rather slowly idly winding my way) through one of the smarter parts of town, where the children still see school as a privilege and an opportunity rather than a drudge to be endured. To my left I spotted a young lad sporting, with not the slightest sense of shame, what can only be described as an “umbrella hat” with multi-coloured panels perched proudly on the top of his head.

Nobody mocked him for this eccentricity, although I did smile to myself at the sight, feeling glad that there was still hope for the nonconformist to find a place in this increasingly bland and uniform society we seem to be creating for ourselves, where the individual is more often than not laughed at and pointed out and shamed back into blending in with everyone else.

Later on, as I got nearer to my destination, my movement was paused alongside a bus travelling in the opposite direction, back, no doubt, towards those other schoolchildren I had seen earlier on. On the back seat, almost oblivious to her friends around her, a schoolgirl was meticulously applying her mascara with that special intensity that only the young seem to have. I wondered to myself whether she was doing this on the bus, taking advantage of its prolonged stop in the traffic, because make-up was “not allowed” by her parents, and whether this small act of rebellion, if that’s what it was, was intended to impress the boy in the umbrella hat, but I doubted it. That kind of universal perfection only happens in the storybooks, even on a morning with a miraculous rainbow in the sky, but it gave me hope for a little while and made me smile again.

All of this had taken place to the acoustic accompaniment of the CD I had popped into the player as I set off that morning, so instead of listening to my usual slightly depressing soundtrack of hard news on Radio 4, instead I heard an overview of tunes from the lengthy career of that recently defunct rock band “R.E.M” and I was immediately transported back over a decade and a half to a road trip I once made to the west coast of the United States and my spirits positively soared at the memory, and, rather surprisingly, all of the autumnal colours and misty fields of the roads from Lesser Blogfordshire towards civilisation suddenly seemed in my mind to resemble those landscapes of that great continent so far away.

Maybe it was the light, or maybe just the ambience, but for a moment I was back there, heading south on the great Interstate highway, just setting out on a new adventure with a suitcase and a hired Ford Mustang and I felt young and excited again.

Strangely, I’m pretty sure that the tunes that were causing this epiphany weren’t even ones that I took along with me on that trip so very long ago. I do remember the lovely Miss Pearce presenting me with a cassette (yes, it was THAT long ago…) of what she described as “driving music” to help while away my many anticipated hours hurtling along that two-lane blacktop, and which led to one or two CD purchases as I travelled around, and I do remember listening to the appropriate “Hole” track as I approached the replacement Tacoma Narrows bridge, but I can only imagine that it was the simple joyous spirit I was hearing almost as if for the first time in listening to “Radio Free Europe” again that morning that reminded a corner of my mind of something rather special, from a time before I grew into the cynical, crusty, disappointed old sod I have since become.

I rather suspect that none of the things that I have described to you today, the rainbow, the umbrella hat, or the mascara girl are things that I would normally even have noticed on a normal morning’s commute, so I can only imagine that it was having the jaunty soundtrack accompanying me on my journey that made all of the difference.

Perhaps there’s something in that. Perhaps, if I am to become a happier and more forgiving fellow once again, perhaps I should eschew my constant desire to feel “informed” and instead pop a few tunes into the old CD player of a morning and maybe my own little life will seem a much jollier place to be living in.