Brewing up a Storm.

“Happy Winds-day” – Winnie the Pooh.

I don’t think we’ve ever had a real hurricane before.  I remember our getting hit by the tail end of Hurricane Charley, when I was a teenager.  The wind frightened the life out of our dog and forced my five siblings and I to stay in the house together for twenty-four hours and get on each other’s nerves more than you would believe possible.  That was the closest we ever got.  But this time it wasn’t the tail end of a hurricane.  We were to get our very own hurricane, and it was to be the worst storm in decades.

There were two reactions to the news.  The first, people who scoffed and insisted they’d go about their daily life as if it wasn’t happening.  Like His Nibs.

And the second was from people like me.  People whose thoughts immediately went to whether we’d all be expected to go to work.  And if we weren’t, how much chocolate we should get in to get through the storm, and what films we could watch, and whether we should get the chimney cleaned as part of our hurricane preparation.  Because as everyone knows, listening to the wind howling around the house and the rain bouncing off the windows is far, far nicer if you have a fire lighting inside.

Nothing I could do tempted His Nibs to join me in my pre-storm musings.  He insisted there would be no hurricane.
On Sunday night, he was in bed before ten.  I stayed up, watching the doom-laden forecasts. He showed not a scrap of gratitude for the running commentary I was giving him on the storm reports.
When I woke him to tell him that all non-urgent hospital appointments were suspended, he just looked confused
“Do you have a hospital appointment?”
“No.  I’m just telling you.  Things are getting serious.  And all the schools and government offices are closed.  I’m not sure we’ll be working tomorrow.”
“We’ll be working, never fear.  Now if you’re getting up at six you should probably go to bed.”

I would in my hat.  Who in their right mind would get up at six in the morning and take off on the long trek to Dublin, in the height of the hurricane drama?  What if I couldn’t get home again?  What if I got into an accident, or the wind was too strong for the car? 
Or what if I went to work and nobody else did, and I was left sitting there for the day, all by myself, working like a fool while everyone else was at home with their films and chocolate?

His Nibs is on the late shift this week.  He didn’t have to leave our house until nine thirty.  I informed him that I would not be driving to work in the morning, that my absolute best offer was to go in his car with him.  This would get me to work at least an hour later than I should be there.  His Nibs, king of punctuality, strongly disapproved.
But I held firm. At ten past nine, despite his objections, I rang the office and confirmed that we were not expected to travel, we were to stay at home.  And I imparted the joyous tidings to my spouse, expecting him to do a happy dance.

He didn’t dance.  He didn’t even smile.  He rolled his eyes and went on about how dramatic everybody is, and hitched up the hounds to go for a walk.  When he got home, he couldn’t seem to cope with the unexpected day off.  Usually, when he has a day’s holidays, he’s booked it and relished the thoughts of it for weeks beforehand.  He was like a hen on an egg.  He couldn’t settle.
He went to the shop, to buy sandwich food, in case the electricity went off.  He collected every candle in the house for the same reason.  Sadly, we’re the kind of people who only have scented candles, and I shuddered to think what the combined smells would be like in an emergency, but I said nothing.  He went out to the garden to make sure there wasn’t anything that would be blown away, cut down some of the taller plants, and practically built a brick wall around the wheelie bins.
And then he sighed and tutted and looked bored and announced that he was going to town to buy salt for the water softener.  His various little jobs had taken the best part of the morning.  Probably because he had had absolutely no assistance from me.  It was surprising how fast I was able to adapt to the change, actually.  I went from normal Monday morning to duvet day in the blink of an eye.

By the time he decided to go to town, it was lunchtime.  The wind was building up quickly, the trees were already bending, the leaves were whipping up into floating swirls all around the garden.  I did not want my spouse, who was being grumpy, but still quite lovable, in his manly “batten down the hatches, fix things, protect my family” way, to go out in the car. I had to talk him out of it.  It’s all very well insisting that it’s all a storm in a teacup (for want of a better phrase), but hurricanes are dangerous.  Even I know that.

Poppy, the boldest dog, was his willing comrade in the bad behaviour for the rest of the day.  When Rory or Marley went outside to complete their toilet, they became alarmed at the back door, ran out, did their business as quickly as possible, and scampered back indoors, their tails between their legs.  Rory, being Rory, then insisted on being carried around and reassured and petted.  Every time.
Poppy, on the other hand, was running around and jumping and barking at the wind.  She seemed quite excited by it all.  And His Nibs seemed to quite like it as well, once it was actually happening.  He kept running in and out of the garden with her, ostensibly to let her go to the loo, but plainly to see how things were progressing.  And he kept me up to date on developments.

“It’s getting hard to walk against the wind now, love.”

“Well don’t do it then.  Come in and close the fecking door.”

“It doesn’t seem too bad now.  Will we all go for a walk?”

“Are you mental?  Look at poor little Rory, he’d be like a balloon on a string.  Sit down, for Christ’s sake.”

His next report was that our glasshouse had not made it.  “All the glass is smashed, and I think some of the frame has bent in the wind.”

“So where are you going now?”

“Out to pick up the glass, obviously.  I don’t want one of the dogs to cut their paw, do I?”

I tried to tell him that I didn’t think running around the garden in a hurricane, picking up pieces of broken glass was a good idea.  But by the time I got the words out he was gone.

Finally, he asked me to text the neighbours, to let them know that there was now a hole in their roof, where the tiles had blown off.

“They’re flying around out there.   Come out and see it.”

“What’s flying around?”

“The roof tiles, loads of them, it’s like confetti.” And he calls me dramatic.

“Love, I’m only going to tell you this once.  You are specifically and irrevocably forbidden from standing in the garden looking around like an eejit when there’s roof tiles flying around.  You’ll get planked with one.”

In the end I gave him my laptop, an item with which I am unusually stingy, to keep him quiet.  His own is broken, and there’s a new series on Netflix I was confident he’d watch, if I could get him to sit down for long enough.

It worked beautifully for a while.  But once the electricity went off, he almost lost his mind with the boredom.  He stood flicking the light switches on an off sorrowfully.  I can only assume this action is driven by the same compulsion that used to make people press the telephone’s disconnect button frantically on old films.

When I shouted at him to give it up, he went to bed.  At half past seven.  I thought he was bonkers.  But then I have a kindle, so I could read.  Soon, though, the darkness and the cold, and the general misery of not being able to have a cup of coffee or watch Netflix sent me upstairs too.

I went straight to sleep, even though the wind was still howling around the house and it was about eight o’clock in the evening.  And I slept right through to six in the morning.  I don’t think I’ve had ten straight hours sleep since I was a child, unless you count hangover sleeps that go on into the afternoon, which I don’t.

Maybe the best thing about the storm was its name.  Ophelia.  Very posh and literature-y.

If Music be the Food of Love.....

“You got joy for singing burning in your soul” – Huckleberry Grove, Ocean Colour Scene.

There’s been a big development in my life lately.  I have regained some of my youth and become a cool person.  Or at least I believe I have.  For I have finally, at long last, activated a music streaming account on my phone.  I’m delighted with myself.  I love that I don’t have to download albums, and I have a playlist for the car, made up entirely of songs I shout along to on the N7. 

I just had free Spotify for ages.  And then my sister came home for her holidays.  We were having a couple of glasses of wine one night when we ended up singing along to this playlist.  Except that every couple of minutes it started shouting adverts at us and ruining our fun.

Then both my sisters decided that since they were enjoying the music, they would share my list.  I had no idea that this was even possible, but basked in the glory of my choices, that they wanted my list for themselves. 

My list wasn’t shareable.  My sisters turned to me and asked me why I was paying a decent sized phone bill every month and not using all the facilities.  Apparently, I needed Spotify Premium.  Then they asked me whether I was still carrying a hundred CDs around in my car.  No, I confessed.  Sad to say the cd player in my car was the first sign of its advancing age.  I thought the CDs were tending to jump in the car stereo.  It turned out the stereo was actually scratching the life out of every one of them.

It then quickly came to light that my iPod is almost ten years old.  So old, in fact, that it’s a bit like a brick.  I decided, when I bought it, that I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.  I told myself that I’d look after this iPod like it was a child, that I’d never break it or lose it, so I might as well get the best one.  I got the one that stored 160 GB of music. 

I’ve only ever owned a couple of hundred albums in my life.  So maybe three thousand songs, including all the ones that I am old enough to think of as B sides, that I never listened to.

This iPod could hold at least forty thousand songs.  I have absolutely no idea what I was thinking of. It’s not as if I have wildly eclectic musical tastes.  I have never once thought I’d love to hear some nice throat singing, or maybe a good country and western album.  I’ve liked many of the same bands since I was a teenager.  For certain, there’s some newer songs I like too (though very few newer than about five years ago, I’m sorry to say.  How old am I???)

Anyway, the point is that the iPod is now so incredibly old that you can’t even upload songs to it anymore.  Or at least I can’t.  Maybe even Apple has forgotten they ever existed.

So, my sisters asked me, am I happy to live a life without music? I objected immediately.  I have music in my life.  Didn’t I have a very dodgy Spotify account?  And sure, haven’t I my own voice?  I assured them that I sing my days away and have often been asked to desist immediately by my colleagues at work. 

They looked horrified.

“So your entire connection with music is listening to more adverts than music on Spotify and singing to yourself?”

My sisters have music playing constantly in their homes and cars.  This has engendered a love of music in their children, I’ve found, and my nieces and nephews knowing more about the music of my generation than I do.

I felt a hundred years old.

“You’re right.  What the feck is wrong with me?”

Into the phone shop, the following day, hoping to meet the girl I met the last time I was in there, who obliged me by telling me all the details of her personal life while I was conducting my business.  No sign of her of course.  Instead I spoke to a surly looking pup who looked at me askance when I asked him how to get Spotify Premium.

“Do you know your own phone number?”

He obviously thought I was a complete moron.  I tossed my head and sniffed that of course I did, and tried to look as if I was only getting sorted out now because I’d been so busy touring with some amazing band.

He checked my account, and our relationship deteriorated further when it came to light that the service is included in my bill, but I’d never used it before.  Judgement hung heavy in the air.

I got it all sorted out very quickly, in the end.  And then I lost a few days of my life, as I stared, mesmerised, at all the albums I could get, absolutely free.

It became clear very early that I was reliving my entire life through the music.  And, as in all things, His Nibs was hauled, kicking and screaming, into the project.

“What song was playing the first time we slow danced together?”

“What song was played immediately after that, here’s a hint, we both loved it, so we kept dancing, instead of running off into a corner to molest each other?”

“What song did you used to love so much that we got that poor girl to work out the notes and play it on the flute at our wedding”?

“What was the song I loved and kept playing that time we went to France?”

He didn’t know any of the answers of course.  And I didn’t tell him.  Instead, I’d play the relevant song on Spotify, and expect him to stand there grinning at me like an eejit for the duration of the song. He was miserable.  And I kept trying to make him dance around the kitchen with me.  I’m not a good dancer. 

Eventually, I walked into the kitchen one Sunday, my phone in my hand, and he yelped at me

“Don’t ask me any more questions about music, love, please.  I just don’t know.  I can’t remember what day of the week it is, never mind what song you sang on a holiday fifteen years ago.  Please, please, just leave me alone.”

So I started on my sisters.  Same game “Do you remember our favourite song when we were getting ready to go out in the early nineties?”

The great thing about siblings is that they have no fear.  They don’t worry that you’ll leave them if they aren’t nice to you.  We’ll always be sisters, it doesn’t matter how annoying I am or how much they tell me to belt up for myself.  They put me straight fairly quickly, with the information that not everybody has been in a musical coma for years, and to feck off.

But my exuberance could not be blunted.  I’ve been through my entire life in music, from my teenage years, through to about 2012, squealing with joy when I find another song I thought I’d forgotten forever.

After a couple of days I walked boldly into one of those shops that only sell technological yokes, and straight up to the counter

“A bluetooth speaker please.”

“Right.  What kind?”

“The kind that will let me play music on my phone all over the house.”

The shop assistants were two very young men.  They looked at each other and twitched their hipster beards.

“Do you want a big one or a small one?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want it loud enough to have at a party?”

“Christ no.  I don’t have parties.  Look at me.”  I couldn’t help noticing the look of relief crossing the short one’s face.

“Just a normal one.”

One of the young fellas went off and came back with a speaker at least as big as the ones that came with my last stereo.  Not what I wanted at all.  So I told him so.

“That one won’t do.  Sure it’ll take up the whole front seat.”

Poor Daniel, according to his nametag, was baffled.

“The front seat?”

“The front seat of my car.  I want to play music in the car and in the house.”

“Doesn’t your car have a USB port?”

“Hardly, it’s nearly as old as I am.”

He sighed audibly now.

“How much do you think this speaker is going to cost?”

“I don’t know.  Not a fiver, like the ones in Penney’s.  One that won’t crackle all the time.  I imagined about thirty euro?”

It’s called a KS cube.  It’s bright blue, and is about two inches square.  I’m delighted with it.

I’m hoping that I’ll soon get over my new obsession.  I might finally be able to take my headphones out for long enough for my ears to cool down.  Or maybe I’ll stop turning on the little speaker and playing some of my shameful musical secrets in rooms where His Nibs is trying to watch television.  For yes, I have now become familiar enough with the whole business to have learnt how to create a private list for myself.  Some of the songs on it would make your hair stand on end.  It's fantastic.