LIFE NOTES (1 OF ?)

 

The first memory would be Saturday 9 January 1965, on my way back home from hospital where I had nearly died of pneumonia, not yet one year old. This was the first of what are to date five occasions when I have cheated death. It was midnight and my parents and I were in this taxi heading towards Uddingston; the car radio was on and broadcasting the Light Programme. There was some nocturnally chirpy news-reading, followed by the gravely avuncular tones of Pete Murray. We were passing by what used to be Calderpark Zoo, at the junction where the M8 and A74 briefly meet before branching off to Edinburgh and England respectively. The orange neon darkness, the not-quite-this-worldliness. I would revisit that scenario in my lucidly dreamed mind some fifty-three years later.

 

I didn’t almost die of pneumonia in hospital – which was almost certainly the Glasgow Royal Infirmary – but contacted it at home because my cot was situated in a damp and cold room. That messed up my lungs for life. The room in question was swiftly decommissioned and turned into an attic/storage space area. I still have dreams about ancient things being uncovered there, beneath seemingly immovable piles of indeterminate material.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT

I have written a 117,156-word book entitled Uncorrected Bound Proof . I commenced writing it on 1 January 2023 and finished editing it today. The book consists of 100 chapters, each based on a song in my personal Your Top Songs 2022 algorithmic Spotify playlist, in ascending order from numbers 100-1. The book’s purpose is to tell the story of my not uneventful life, but I have done so in accordance with the strict numbering order of the playlist. This means that the events of my life are told out of sequence; however, I have ensured that the central autobiographical narrative has remained united and coherent.   While this is a book dictated by music, and which in large part consists of musical criticism, it is, however, not a book about music. It ventures with moderate violence against the grain of what is normally perceived as music writing. It mixes autobiography, criticism and semi-abstract thinking in ways which have not previously been attempted in this field. Its influence
Read more

NO MORE AGAIN - CARLA BLEY

Image
  It was the afternoon of Saturday, 16 February 1980, a day I'll remember for the rest of my life, when I travelled to the old Bridge Street Library in the heart of the old Gorbals, in Glasgow, to listen to Escalator Over The Hill . The work had intermittently crossed my radar but I had not actually listened to it and knew of Carla Bley largely by reputation only. Because I lived in Uddingston at the time I was only allowed to borrow books and music from Lanarkshire county libraries, but because my father worked in Glasgow I managed to get a pass to read books and listen to music in Glasgow libraries, even though I couldn't take them out. So it was that I listened, on library headphones, to all six sides of Escalator . Shortly beforehand I had dreamed the entire record and was now naturally very keen to listen to the thing itself. I was utterly transported, and transformed. I left that library in a daze, wandered around various, mostly disused areas of Clydeside. It was as if
Read more

UNCORRECTED BOUND PROOF BOOK PROPOSAL: THE EMOTIONAL REMIX

Marcello Carlin is a lifelong NHS worker who writes about music in his spare time. In fact he has written several million words about music in various blogs, books and publications over the last quarter-century. It is extremely likely that you have not read any of them. I was briefly famous in the late summer of 1967 for being able to read and write fluently at an exceptionally early age. At the time I was assumed to be a child prodigy. Because my parents could not afford specialist tutors for me, however, I had no alternative but to go to school like any other normal child. That was the second mistake. The first mistake was that my status as a child prodigy was a misdiagnosis. As soon as I started school, which in retrospect was somewhere I shouldn't have been left anywhere near, I viewed life and especially other people through a peculiar gauze screen. I could see my peers but couldn't understand the unspoken body language and therefore had an extremely difficult time trying
Read more