Month: March 2023

General

Happy Birthday to my Dad!

June L

My Dad is 90 years old today! He doesn’t look it (he looks 10 years younger than that, just as my Mum always used to look 10 years younger than her age).

We are visiting him at his home today; he has had a virus recently so the meal I had planned has been deferred until he feels better. However, I thought it would be interesting to know what has happened on this day in history. So here are a few things that the 16th of March has brought over the centuries:

1322: The Battle of Boroughbridge takes place in the first War of Scottish Independence.

1792: Assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden (he was shot at a masked ball at the Opera; he died a few days later).

1834: Charles Darwin, aboard HMS Beagle, anchors in the recently British-acquired Falkland Islands for the first time.

1850: Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is published.

1867: First publication of an article in The Lancet by Joseph Lister outlining the discovery of antiseptic surgery.

1933: My Dad born!

1934: Academy Award gold statuette first called Oscar in print by Sidney Skolsky.

1935: Scotland beats England 10-7 at Murrayfield, Edinburgh, to allow Ireland to win the Home Nations Rugby Championship with a 2-1 record.

1940: German air raid on Scapa Flow.

1968: Robert F Kennedy announces presidential campaign

1976: British Prime Minister Harold Wilson announces his resignation.

1996: Mike Tyson TKOs Frank Bruno in third round to gain heavyweight title.

2014: Voters in Crimea vote overwhelmingly to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia.

2022: British-Iranians Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori return to the UK after being detained for five and six years on spying charges.

General

One year on……

June L

This blog post has been on my mind for a while. It hasn’t been comfortable writing it but I like to spill my thoughts and feelings into words sometimes. It has been a tough year, but hope is becoming less of a glimmer and more of a sunbeam now.

A year ago today, we buried my beloved Mum. She had been living with metastasized cancer for almost three years but she kept her wit right up until her last day on this planet which was wholly spent asleep. The day that she passed away was a day that I had been dreading, not only since she got her diagnosis but for as long as I can remember. As a very young child, I can recall in my nightly prayers praying that God would make sure that “Mummy and Daddy didn’t die or hurt themselves”; I think both as a child, and as a middle-aged woman, I wanted my parents to live forever.

My Mum and I were very close. We’d go on shopping trips (our clothes tastes differed greatly as they would between generations) or outings for coffee. After my radiotherapy finished, and as a belated 21st birthday present, my Mum took me to Paris for the weekend – that was a time of much laughter and fun as we tried out our sketchy French – particularly my Mum’s strange pronunciation – everywhere we went. After I got married, I called Mum and Dad every other day and, since Covid, I phoned twice every day (I still phone my Dad at 10am and 5.30pm everyday now). I still expect my Mum to pick up the phone and answer with her customary “Hi, Juney – I’m being very lazy but thought I would wait for your call before I got up”. I still fight the urge to pick up the phone and let her know about conversations I have had with people she knew, or if I notice an announcement in the paper that a friend of hers has passed away. It’s the weirdest feeling. With my husband’s mother having passed away six weeks before my own Mum, I am suddenly thrown into the role of family matriarch – something I still can’t get my head around. Am I not too young to be a matriarch? Also, who do I go to for advice on things? My Mum was my fount of knowledge, wisdom, and experience – I tapped into it frequently. Now, there is nobody. I just have to hobble through and hope for the best.

I’m so thankful that we had her for 81 years. 81 sounds old, but my Mum always looked at least 10 years younger than her age. And she was active – oh boy! Intensely house proud, she would be cleaning their flat every day, or going out for long, long walks with my Dad – a past-time they both loved. She also loved her coffee mornings with her former work colleagues with whom she had kept in contact since her retirement. Then April 2019 happened, and things gradually came to a stop.

It’s not been an easy year. I think, for me, I have found it hard to take ownership of the fact that Mum has gone. I have a Christian faith and so I know she has gone to a better place, but I weirdly can’t think of it as being my Mum who has gone. Only four people have asked how I have been following her death: two of my best friends, my PhD supervisor, and the wife of the minister of the church we now go to. Everybody else expressed their sorrow but then immediately asked “How are your Dad and brother coping?” Every time. Nobody asked how I was doing. This isn’t meant to come across as a personal pity-party, but I think this has fed into me thinking, and feeling, that I have to be strong for my Dad and brother as it is their wife and Mum who has gone, more than mine.

Sadly, both my husband and I have had to deal with our respective losses largely by ourselves. The local church (which both my parents [Dad had been an Elder there] and my husband had been going to regularly, and was indeed one of the pianists at, for over a decade. I stopped going after 2012 for much the same reasons as the ones I will give now) remained silent. Nobody came out to visit us, or gave us much needed spiritual support during our grief. Nobody from the church phoned us up to ask how we were and if we would like a visit or some practical help. Nobody asked after our kids who had lost both of their grandmothers in the space of six weeks. Only one couple out of the whole congregation turned up one evening with a prepared meal and some baking for us – we so appreciated it. I know people are busy, but aren’t church families supposed to be there to support those in need? And isn’t that support supposed to come from those in leadership roles? We really hoped that someone would just come to the door and offer us some solace through Bible verses or prayer. The church has Elders, and while we weren’t members of the church, we were ‘associate members’ – why didn’t any of them come and see us, especially as so many of them knew my Mum and, indeed, us? We were both feeling incredibly numb and vulnerable; both of us hate asking people for help (mainly because in the past, when I have, nothing happened). People saying, “I’ll pray for you” became, to me, merely a Christian-ised way of signing off from a conversation. How often I wanted to yell “Pray WITH me! I don’t know how to deal with this!” but the opportunity to do so didn’t arise. Surely church Elders still do pastoral visits these days, don’t they? I know one lady (who wasn’t even our Elder) used to drop by with the church magazine in the years following my cancer surgery. On the occasions she dropped by and I was in, I enjoyed seeing her and having a chat. She was the only person who used to do so. Now that the magazine is digital, there is tumbleweed. Don’t get me wrong – I appreciated any prayers that were going, but when you feel your own already shaky and dwindling faith draining away further, they seemed to lose their importance. They seemed empty. I used to wonder if people really were praying for us, or was it just the ‘right thing’ to say? [I like to think the former as I do aim to find the best in people].

So, locally, we were floundering quite a lot. We felt that others thought that we shouldn’t be mourning our mothers as they were both in their 80s, and then we questioned whether we were making too much of it. But, as I’ve mentioned, we were both close to our mothers – as were the kids to their grandmothers – and if you can’t grieve your parents, who can you grieve? I like to think that if any of my friends fell ill, that I would provide some form of help (indeed, I have provided meals for friends who have been in need over recent years among other things). But, it’s sad (and more than a little disappointing) that when the person in need is yourself and help – whether it be practical, emotional, or spiritual – is lacking.

Well, that all changed when – during COVID – we started virtually attending a church in Edinburgh whose members have helped us immensely over the past year. It’s not Church of Scotland this time but an Independent church (doesn’t belong to a denomination). Despite us living 23 miles away, the minister (and on one occasion his wife) visited us four times over four Fridays last March/April and provided the spiritual support we were so badly needing. In addition, we have made other friends there who genuinely pray WITH us in these early (and currently uncertain) days. They are keen for us to get involved in different things there, which I am so happy about – I like to use my (recently rusted) ‘gifts’. One of our main reasons for moving home is so that we can be nearer this congregation and, basically, start again. I have learned so much from these experiences – mostly things which I have taken for granted (or thought that other people would be doing so held off doing them myself).

Out of my experience 11 years ago and, more recently our mothers’ deaths, I have learned how important it is to look out for people who are hurting and to actually DO something about it. When we move, I want to become active in visiting people – I like chatting – so that they never feel isolated as we have done. Although I miss you, Mum, more than you know, thank you for helping me to realise that at times of greatest need, the best thing I can do is be there for whoever needs it. Even if ‘being there’ means not talking but just being there. It’s what you have done for others over your lifetime. It may take me a little while longer to take ownership of the fact that you have gone, but with a little help from our new friends, we’ll get by.

Opinion

The Power of a Tune

June L

In the UK, within the past few days, one of the BBC’s longest-running radio hosts, Ken Bruce, hosted his final mid-morning show on Radio 2. I have listened regularly to this show since the days I was at home with my very young children, often trying to gain full marks on Popmaster whilst both of them were having their mid-morning nap (but always managing to get at least “a year out”). Before this, his voice was very much a part of my morning school run (after he inherited the Breakfast Show from Sir Terry) as Dad would have Radio 2 on in the car, on the occasional visits he was delivering lectures later in the day and could take my brother and I to school.

Although Radio 2 was my default radio station when I was in my 30s and early 40s, I have found it less and less appealing more recently. What I call “my era” seemed to be less represented – whether that be in radio show hosts with whom I have either heard on the airwaves for many years, or those much the same age as myself, or in the music played. I don’t like “modern stuff” and haven’t followed the Top 40 since I was in my 20s and thus I have tended to drift either to Radio 3 or to my Spotify playlists, forsaking radio altogether. [I used also to listen to Radio 4 in the mornings but nowadays I cannot be bothered with politicians within earshot first thing in the morning, and ‘Woman’s Hour’ is just not the same any more]. While classical music is my chief listen nowadays, I grew up listening to Blondie, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, and Captain Beaky and his Band on my prized first Sony transistor radio.

So, with the departure of Ken Bruce from Radio 2, I decided to tune in to the digital station which will be his new employer in just under one month’s time: Greatest Hits Radio. I wasn’t enamoured with the name but I thought I would give it a shot, after all – you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, right? I generally can’t abide commercials and so I opted for the 30 day free access to the no-ads version. Within seconds, songs of my childhood and youth filled the room – some tunes which I hadn’t heard for decades but whose tones took me right back to school trips/ my bedroom in the house I grew up in / long summer holidays / social events / holidays. Granted, if I listen to pop/rock music it tends to be from the 1970 – 1999 era, when – in my opinion – music was MUCH better than it is now. But still, to be instantly transported back in time proved, for me, to be a lovely, comforting, happy thing. Back to the times when both of my parents were alive, as were my Gran and Grandad. Back to the free days of childhood when summers seemed to stretch out of reach and Christmases still held some magic. Back to the days of passing my driving test and trying to boost my street-cred by having current rock tunes blowing full-blast out of my little Mini’s tape deck. Back to the more challenging days of cancer treatment (which, for me, made up most of my 20s) when tunes from the Spice Girls mingled with my chemotherapy regimes and recovering in the sunshine of my parents’ back garden. Back to our wedding day – always evoked by ‘Men in Black’, oddly – just days after the death of Princess Diana and Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind’ remake. Hearing Simon Mayo’s show – including the famous Confessions – on GHR now, takes me back to our Sixth Form common room where we all used to tune in every day to hear the day’s plea for forgiveness before going to Prayers. Really lovely memories. It’s great to see these shows continuing more or less as they were in my teenage years, albeit on a different station. In an ever-changing world, it’s nice to think of some things staying the same.

In a 2021 article in Psychology Today, Dr Shahram Heshmat links this ability to recall pieces of music from the dusts of time with activity in the implicit memory, which he says is involved in a form of ‘classical conditioning’. Here emotions, events and songs combine together often evoking some form of response when the person is exposed to a piece of music previously heard a long time ago. This is true in my case: when I was receiving radiotherapy back in the summer of 1992, Betty Boo’s ‘Let Me Take You There’ was a big tune in the charts. It seemed to be playing everywhere, every day. Now, I can’t hear that tune without re-experiencing the nausea that I felt as a result of the radiotherapy. As I post the link to the video above, and I catch the first few notes of the introduction, I’m already feeling seedy. Thing is, I liked that tune before I started treatment!

Heshmat also quotes findings from a study which found that most memories that are evoked by music are from when the individual was between 10 and 30 years old, a concept that psychologists call the “reminiscence bump”. According to Heshmat, this is because during these years, we experience many things for the first time, and life appears more exciting. To quote Heshmat, “Music preference is formed around the middle teenage years”.

Before I started my nursing degree, I took a gap year working in a psychogeriatric hospital ward. It housed 30 adults with varying degrees of Alzheimer’s and dementia, some of whom didn’t even know where they were. Most of these adults needed everything done for them and, as is the nature of dementia, some were physically aggressive. It was quite an eye-opener into the world outside school. One of my favourite things to do was to put old records into the record player and watch the transformation of these old souls. All of them knew every word of all the songs from ‘The Sound of Music’ album and some even started dancing. The same went for other albums by singers who would have been popular in their youth. Just putting on the records seemed to renew these people and often we could get a glimpse of each patient as a young person. Sometimes, these patients would then start talking about the memories associated with the different tunes – short vignettes of lucidity in their otherwise confused lives. The power of a tune.

So, as I type, Greatest Hits Radio is playing over my speaker. We’ve got some Deacon Blue ‘Real Gone Kid’ on just now – which takes me right now back to 17 year old me on our school trip to the tennis championships at Wimbledon (my best friend and I were HUGE Deacon Blue fans and spent most of the train journey from Edinburgh to London listening to their albums on our Walkmans non-stop). 51-year-old me values these lovely memories so much. I think I’ll keep on listening to this station so that I can enjoy my aural autobiography playing out in my mind and memory.