The Power of Music.

Now that the days are growing shorter I need more indoor evening diversions than I did during the long, light days of May, June and July. Unfortunately, I have little to keep me occupied. No DVDs, nothing on the TV, no emails to write, and YouTube doesn’t get its slot until after midnight for reasons already explained. So tonight I decided to listen to an old favourite album of music from Julie Fowlis, Uam, which I gather is Scots Gaelic and means ‘from me to you.’

As soon as the first bar came through the headphones I was transported back ten years, back to the winter of 2011 when I spent every night sitting by the fireside with this album while reading The Mists of Avalon. It was a book I lived rather than merely read, and Uam is so indelibly associated with it that they might be conjoined twins.

And so the memory of those days sweeps over me like the incoming tide, but the experience doesn’t stop at mere simpering and ultimately pointless nostalgia. It promotes reflection on the intervening years. I question the similarities and differences between who I was then and who I am now. Am I better or worse or just different? How do my respective circumstances compare? And what of the people who were in my orbit back then, and who have now nearly all gone without the benefit of replacement? How did my life path guide me onto that ‘quiet street where old ghosts meet’ to quote Mr Kavanagh? And there was the blissful ignorance of the dam of health issues that was to break over me exactly seven years later and which are now dominating my life.

These and more reflections full of sound and feeling, signifying nothing. And all from a few bars of Julie Fowlis’s music. And will any of it inform or affect what length of road I still have to walk? Almost certainly not.

Unusually for me, I’m posting this raw – no editing – while I’m still listening to the music.