I can't write much while my children are here because they live on the computer. As the time flies by I don't realise that even stream of conciousness writing takes at least an hour usually. An odd moment tonight when my daughter and I were filling in an hour of boredom and I put on 'The Mountain Goats' which I have to say I rather sadly bought after reading one of Joshua's pieces. She said 'Funny, this sounds very like Nick Drake'. I said 'WHAT did you say?'. I had never heard of him until I was reading a series of detective stories by Phil Rickman,( which I mentioned to Ms.D. because the main character is a young woman priest), and the stories have many references to N.D. and his lyrics etc. which I thought were fictional. Then I read the acknowledgements at the back and found he was real and bought the CD.s and the biography and the sheet music to give to my son for Christmas in 2 days time, thinking that no one else had heard of him and this was really original. This was part of my own secret parallel life, so intoducing my son to him was a slight concession and then to find that my daughter and her friends listen to his stuff all the time was totally bizarre.

Years ago I had a boyfriend who was seeing an analyst 5 days a week at vast expense and he was someone (the analyst) who NEVER SPOKE. So the boyfriend would go in , say Hello, lie on the couch and drone on about his dreams etc. for an hour, say Goodbye and leave. I couldn't bear the waste of money of this and made him give it up and talk to me instead. In fact I made him get up a little early and write down what he would have said to the analyst and he was writing 1,000 words a day. I thought it would be interesting for him to look over it later. Anyway, as part of all this I decided that we would both write down , each day, anything that the other one did which upset or irritated us. We were on really close and good terms and also talked constantly but even so when we read out our notes each evening we had invariably managed to have strange misunderstandings, often quite serious. I was reminded of this by the Nick Drake thing as I talk to my daughter quite a lot and hear her playing her music but obviously everyone has this vast 'other life' that you can never grasp and like 'L'Appartement' you constantly keep passing and missing each other in ways that could change your life. Oh well, too bad.
- posted by Iris @ 12/23/2003 10:14:00 PM comment