lesleyjonesberry

Presently (as my son would say), I live alone.  The closest I’ve come to this before was as a fledgling undergraduate.  Term times in a small self-contained College room, home still a safe refuge.   There followed many years of shared domestic environments – house shares, marriage, family life – which expanded, for a short while, into three generations, not to mention cats and dog, then a return to coupledom and now it’s just me. 

At the start of the Zeffirelli film of La Traviata, the overture plays lushly on the soundtrack, while Violetta drifts through deserted rooms like Miss Havisham. At least she does in my head – I haven’t watched the film for over thirty years. She is waiting for her lover, and she is waiting for her death: this being full blown Romantic opera, both come, the second hard on the heels of the first, just allowing for some impassioned heart-rending, full-lung-capacity singing to stretch – nay blow apart any pretence at – verisimilitude.

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Presently, my days are filled with tears.  As children, we cry easily.  Perhaps, as Shakespeare says, ‘we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools’.  Babies cry from frustration, from pain, from fear, and this is largely a vocal activity – it is crying more than weeping.  Somewhere in Gareth Malone’s book Music for the People I think he says that a baby’s cry is, as it were, designed to be intolerable.  It’s pitched in a way to pierce through all other noises, it demands attention.  It summons succour.

Good Morrow, friends. St Valentine’s is past

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV Scene i

What is love?  This huge essential word.  It motivates us so strongly, and at the same time it is ubiquitous and clichéd.  Patently, it ranges from something quintessential within our psychological core, to the softest, most whimsical, peripheral frond and feather of feeling.