The song is ended but the melody lingers on.”
Irving Berlin
It's not about the words, much more about the melody and memory tone, a moving through both major and more soulful minor keys.
It's also about natural sounds, thunder for example. There's something very reassuring in returning to a location over half a century later to find thunder still chasing round mountain tops, and rainbows still arching into the sky following the storm when all else has changed.
I have lots of place-mat song settings, nonetheless, but it's always the melody much more so than the word that's seeped into my veins! My go to places if you like.
They're mainly mid-sixties tunes pinpointing me in Switzerland, where I lived for just a year. The Beatles were tops for me in Basel.
Memory Snippets
Penny Lane always takes me back to a breakfast table awash with warm coffee smells, Hero Black Cherry jam treacled on Danish Lurpak butter and fresh Baguette (milk bread on Sundays…what was that?), and French Europe 1 radio playing chansons and pop non- stop in the background, whilst I leisurely devoured my latest Agatha Christie novel. Migro Man delivering essential groceries to the house.
‘Puppet on A String’, however, transports me to a small village at the tail- end of Lake Lugano, where we watched Sandie Shaw win Eurovision barefoot on a flickering well past its sell by date black and white television set. And in the early morning, a deeper awakening to Spring, drinking in cascades of white water tumbling from the opposite high cliffs into an already glistening lake. Followed, of course, by the now customary coffee, baguette and Hero jam on the balcony.
‘All you need is Love’ had my Swiss family back in Basel in July 1967, crowded round the television watching Our World, the very first live global television link broadcast by satellite to over 400 million people in 25 countries. These Beatles bedecked in all their finest flower power regalia, and sporting long straggly hair were a very different from the squeaky clean group I'd left behind. All this rounded off with rotisserie chicken warmed over an open fire.
However, the melancholic sound of an Alpenhorn transports me straight to our break in the Swiss Alps, when billowing mists built forbidding fortresses in the sky bidding us snuggle in our cosy hotel rooms sampling cheese fondu. A veritable feast.
Music for me, set a tone. It was never about the word, more about the tone, until much later on in my life. It strikes a chord deep in my heart, transporting me to another world: a gap between Two Worlds even: one passing the other becoming, lighting up my life with a spirit once lost in monochrome tedium.
Heidi
I discovered Johanna Spyri's Heidi as a young teenager. It's the story of the young orphaned Heidi who goes to live with her gruff grandfather in the Swiss Alps. She finds solace living alongside nature, winning over not just her grumpy grandad, but also the immobilised Klara who regains her ability to walk .
I guess a part of me identified strongly with her. I vowed there and then I'd visit Switzerland: an ambition that only grew stronger after watching the television version. This was a huge step for me, as an only child of a single parent family: to set off on my own adventure as an 18 year old, leaving mum behind.
Having already lost my Dad when I was still a tot, I felt hugely responsible for mum, who was never particularly healthy.
To this day I have a strong affinity with not just the Swiss Alps but her glorious mountain lakes too. Mountains are still a favourite go to place of mine. They somehow manage to lift me out of the humdrum mundane, into a world filled with infinite possibility, despite early losses that dammed up my spirit.
Mountain!
It's not the word, but the inspiration
To climb a mountain
Is to watch seasons come and go
Wholeheartedly
GH
Nonetheless, I didnt return to Switzerland until I hit 70:- to visit my old haunts in Basel; to honour my Uncle Albert , an escaped prisoner of war who was lead over the mountains by a female member of the resistance to recuperate on the shores of Lake Luzern, and finally to Lugano, after a detour to Interlaken.
The Switzerland I'd returned to had moved on, but the Lake remained the same as did the surrounding mountain peaks.
Despite the many canvases painted there that have faded across the decades, the Lake still remains the Lake. That's really comforting.
My poem below reflects on that.
It was reassuring to find that thunder still rolled around the mountains on hot sultry afternoons, bringing rain but also rainbows.
Summertime 1967/2018
Half a century gone
and more
But the Lake remains as Lake
A glacial Lake
Contained by Mountains
A microclimate
Bright fresh mornings
Brooding afternoons
Rioting thunder chasing lightening,
Echoes chasing memories
Pause
Rain
Another Pause
and then..
Rainbow
27.4.24 GH
Big thankyou Angie. Coming back to England was a big shock, cos it was 'the happening place'
The Beatles grown their hair in rebellion , and were no longer squeaky clean mop heads I'd left behind. I never got to India like they did but I did study Maharishis Transcendental Meditation..And the rest as they say is history!
A lovely insight into the 'Magic of life' in the 60's your words brought the decade to life...Great stuff ✨️