Summoned by Tubular Bells
I was very happy there once, over forty years ago. So happy, in fact, that I was a bit apprehensive about returning.
I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember
Evelyn Waugh
This week I listened to Tubular Bells – twice. The first was a live performance in a major concert hall, and very good it was. By the end of the night the stalls resembled a very civilized mosh pit. It was boomer heaven, with plenty of beer bellies, male ponytails and black, prismatic T-shirts in evidence among the smarter outfits from Joules and Seasalt.
In theory you could have walked in at the age of 18, completely unfamiliar with the original, and appreciated it as the brilliant piece of music it undoubtedly is, except that none of our kids would have gone within a hundred miles of it. In time, they’ll have their own cultural touchstones, if they don’t already. In fact, like many vintage gigs it was a communal celebration of music that defined a certain time and place, with every guitar battle and building crescendo lovingly anticipated.
I hadn’t realised how young Mike Oldfield was when it was released – 21 at most – or that it was recorded in a single take and he loved it warts and all. He played so many instruments – not just the titular bells but also “Piltdown Man” and “Moribund Chorus” and I’ve always loved his slightly pompous, received English listing of them at the end. I know this because I still have the 4-album Mike Oldfield Boxed set on my shelf, where it remained untouched for decades until I revisited it this week. It must have been a major expenditure for me at the time.
I put it on the turntable this morning and was quickly drawn into happy reverie. Every scratch on the vinyl added to the pleasure of revisiting it and I was glad I’d resisted the temptation to blow £14.00 on the “reimagined” Tubular Bells CD they were flogging at the gig. Give me vinyl any day for a trip down memory lane. Our kids were right about that.
“I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who droned above our heads. In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again. Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned.”
Daphne du Maurier - “Rebecca”
Last week I went to York again. I say “again” because I was very happy there once, over 40 years ago. So happy, in fact, that I was a bit apprehensive about returning
My husband was running a marathon, and it started up at the university campus, so there was no refuge from nostalgia. In fact it was sharpened a little by introducing it all to him. Despite its 1960s Brutalist architecture, it’s a beautifully wooded campus and we saw it at its very best. There have been many changes, but the fundamentals remain – the ducks, the lake, the little church at Heslington surrounded by trees.
We took the path into the city that was once so much a part of my life, picking up the route along the city walls at Walmgate where, eye-level with huge sycamore trees in the full glory of the autumn, we looked down on terraced houses which, once, I had imagined it would be the greatest of all happiness to live in. I’m not sure that’s a bad ambition, even now.
I’d been expecting a full-on Brideshead Revisited experience, full of lost glories and wistful regrets. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was like drinking a glowing glass of fine dessert wine, warmed by the sun. A perfect contentment based fully in the present moment, and intensified, not unpleasantly at all, by memory and gratitude. York had been a safe haven for me, sandwiched between a difficult youth and an uncertain future, a place where I could go through my Ugly Duckling phase supported by medieval towers, church bells, a certain amount of fervent Christianity, and formative friendships. I wouldn’t go back even if I could, but I’ll always owe the city a debt of gratitude.
In Brideshead Revisited, that seminal novel of rose-tinted college memory, the first section is called “Et In Arcadia Ego”. Translated as “I, too, was in Arcadia”, the fateful words were attributed to a skull. There is something particularly poignant about a Paradise when its days are known to be numbered, even as you are enjoying it. Recollected now, free of those shadows, knowing that living there was part of what made me into the person who survived and thrived and lived to return and tell the tale, is a cause of deep, quiet happiness.
Some things – wine, vinyl, autumn leaves releasing the stored sunshine of summer days – really do seem to improve with age. It’s been a good week for remembering that.