Rolls of drawings, thirty years old, from an attic, (boxed and photographed on my 55th birthday, September 2023)

Letter from Glasgow: The Forgotten Music

I was in a charity shop with my daughter, rummaging among old coats at the end of the rail. Suddenly a song came on — a song I knew once but hadn’t heard for ages, it was sort of Northern Soul but it soared with a refrain that came back three times and felt like free-wheeling, soaring to the edge of a landscape. It thrilled me. It gave generously. I was surprised how good it felt to be away from my desk, chancing on songs amongst old clothes. I went to the counter and paid a few pounds for a striped sheet, a check tablecloth and a cellular wool blanket, the song was free.

We left the shop and were walking along the pavement when I realised that I couldn’t recall the song. The strength was not its words but the tune without words and I could not hook it back in. I wondered how to find it this song without words, without a title. How could I remember it?

We went to a performance at a gallery, where daubed canvases were raised on pulleys and women were rolled up and falling out of them, to a soundtrack of looped scrapes and cries. After the earnest discussion that followed we left the gallery. Just before we left, as I was washing my hands at the toilets, the song came bouncing back to me.. All of it. I was so happy, there it was inside me and it had decided to return to me, to cheer me along. I stepped out onto the pavement humming my song. At the bottom of a stone stairwell we stopped and I sang it to my daughter’s phone, as people passed by, to an app that recognises tunes, but to no avail. The app stayed blank and pulsing. So I kept on singing it as we walked through the city to meet my friends. My daughter sang me a line of Bach back, we made a song between the two, call and response. We crossed the road to meet my friend, and then suddenly — the song was gone! It had vanished as subtly as it appeared, and I had no trace of it. I kept trying, but all I got were the more obvious, less brilliant, tunes of the era. This one was not mine to summon. I had not heard it for so many years and now I didn’t know when I would hear it again. I had no clues by which to bring it back.

I think about it inside me, biding its time, resisting my call for it — this song that so delighted me, that returned to me twice, unbidden, yesterday, and then went on its way, went back inside me, perhaps never to return. When it was there I wanted to carry it, be carried by it. I did not think of recording the notes, making a digital imprint by which to catch and hold it. I thought that it was a part of me, that it would last forever. Now I’m waiting, wondering where within me it is hiding.

First published in October 2023