Middle Distance Prophecies!

Today's bathtime iTunes playlist was based on A Soft Place To Land by Kathleen Edwards; other highlights were Jason Isbell's Relatively Easy, Laura Marlin's Night After Night, Bruce Cockburn's Wondering Where The Lions Are, and finally, Gillian Welch's The Way The Whole Thing Ends.

There were lots more good songs but these are my pick of the bunch - please go and look them up, or tell me what you would have hoped for. Music is such a wonder-filled part of my life, almost every song I hear takes me somewhere, usually to a good place in my life, I hope that is the same for you.

This love of music continues to surprise me. In my early life music was almost disqualified for me. My father told me I was tone-deaf, not that he would have had much music in him, what with him playing either the double-bass, or the tuba in the village brass band. Then came Mrs. Kitson at junior school, who caned me viciously across my bare thighs, for either singing out of tune, or laughing. At least she was a competent piano player, or so I am told.

Fortunately, in my fifteenth year, I went to see Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd at Sheffield City Hall. Music would never be relegated to the shadows again (pun intended), the festivals came thick and fast. Bath Blues Festival with the Grateful Dead, Isle of White, Newcastle Under Lyme being one season's diary. Then to catch Led Zeppelin two nights in succession when they were at the top of their game.

In later years it is the folk festivals of Shrewsbury and Cambridge which we have found to suit us down to the ground, although Cambridge could do with a few more seats on the ground. When live music does return, which it will, we might even become like the Bellowhead groupies who we met in the bar at Lincoln during their final tour.

Here's hoping, and here is a poem, written in Cambridge: