circa 1984

Today littlest boy and I have been air guitaring to Born in the USA. I’m so getting the new Bruce Springsteen album. As you can probably tell, I’ve never been on the cutting edge music-wise. I mean, I desperately wanted to be a post-punk Gothic, but I grew up in the country, and it was a bit hard to be post- something that hadn’t even arrived. So for me, it was a pretty straight diet of Eurythmics (I wanted to be Annie Lennox so much that I’m still dye-ing my hair red), INXS, Prince, the Cars, Midnight Oil, Hoodoo Gurus, Pretenders…that type of thing. And Bruce Springsteen.

And every now and then I do like to get them out again. And sometimes I buy the CDs of the cassettes and albums I used to have. It would be cheaper to listen to MMM I suppose (I can’t bear to tell you how much I paid for my Frankie Goes to Hollywood CD), and if I ever write that I’m listening to D*re Straights or J*hn C*ugar Melon-Camp do come and shoot me. If you need to catch a plane the mister will reimburse you.

Perhaps it’s this return to 1984, but I’ve been thinking of asking the house down the street whether I could get a cutting or two of their geraniums. Or maybe it’s the limewash blue and pink I’ve been splashing around the back yard. It’s making me think of terracotta pots and plants with primary-coloured flowers. I said to the mister as I was scrubbing the backyard walls on the weekend ‘I’m Frida Kahlo and you’re Diego Rivera’. He doesn’t want to play. He says ‘I’m happy to steal their colours, but why would we want their lives’. Sometimes you really can tell that I’m humanities and he’s science.

And I bet he would’ve played if I’d said ‘I’ll be Frida and you can be Trotsky’.