Countdown To Christmas (9): Longing And Yearning

Is the place you long and yearn for... a chimerical place?

Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high,
There's a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby.
Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue,
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true.

Someday I'll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far
Behind me.
Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away above the chimney tops
That's where you'll find me.

Somewhere over the rainbow
Bluebirds fly.
Birds fly over the rainbow.
Why then, oh why can't I?

If happy little bluebirds fly
Beyond the rainbow
Why, oh why can't I?

Eva Cassidy: Over The Rainbow

Is the person you long and yearn for... really the person you long and yearn for?

The guilty undertaker sighs,
The lonesome organ grinder cries,
The silver saxophones say I should refuse you.
The cracked bells and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn,
But it's not that way,
I wasn't born to lose you.
I want you, I want you,
I want you so bad,
Honey, I want you...

Bob Dylan: I Want You

Sometimes the longing and yearning for justice, equality and freedom can stride far along the road to fulfilment...

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Martin Luther King: I Have A Dream

Countdown To Christmas (10): Wishing, Hoping, Dreaming

Wishes, hopes and dreams - from the personal to the political, from the intensely individual to the universally communal...

My Father taught me how to sing.
He sang that dreams were everything,
Can't be bought and can't be sold,
More than silver,more than gold...

June Tabor: The Cloud Factory

We shall overcome,
We shall overcome,
We shall overcome, some day.

Oh, deep in my heart,
I do believe
We shall overcome, some day.

Protest song interpreted by Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Bruce Springsteen amongst others. Famously sung by Joan Baez and a crowd of 300,000 people in August 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D. C. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Countdown To Christmas (11): Seeking And Searching

I've looked under chairs
I've looked under tables
I've tried to find the key
To fifty million fables

They call me The Seeker
I've been searching low and high
I won't get to get what I'm after
Till the day I die

I asked Bobby Dylan
I asked The Beatles
I asked Timothy Leary
But he couldn't help me either...

The Who: The Seeker

You’ve been looking to what’s just around the corner
Living for another day
You’ve been looking to the distant skyline
Looking like you lost your way
You’ve been looking so hard for something
Your eyes are getting sore
You’ve been looking so hard
You just don’t know what you are looking for

Karine Polwart: What Are You Waiting For?

I've been walking through the middle of nowhere
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door...

Bob Dylan: Tryin' To Get To Heaven

Is the seeking itself the goal? Is the search the answer?

Countdown To Christmas (12): Camino

A good traveller has no fixed plan and is not intent on arriving. Lao Tzu

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware. Martin Buber

Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe. Anatole France

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes. Marcel Proust

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. Helen Keller

The longest journey a man must take is the eighteen inches from his head to his heart. Unknown

Not all those who wander are lost. J. R. R. Tolkien

The only thing I knew how to do / Was to keep on keepin' on like a bird that flew... Bob Dylan

Countdown To Christmas (13): On The Road

I been warped by the rain, driven by the snow
I'm drunk and dirty, don't ya know,
And I'm still willin'
Out on the road late last night,
Seen my pretty Alice in every head light
Alice, Dallas Alice

I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
I've driven the back roads so I wouldn't get weighed
If you give me: weed, whites, and wine
And you show me a sign
I'll be willin' to be movin'

I've been kicked by the wind, robbed by the sleet
Had my head stoved in, but I'm still on my feet
And I'm still willin'
Now I smuggled some smokes and folks from Mexico
Baked by the sun, every time I go to Mexico
And I been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
I've driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
I've driven the back roads so I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me: weed, whites, and wine
And you show me a sign I'll be willin' to be movin'

Little Feat: Willin'

I'm walkin' down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I'm bound, I can't tell... Bob Dylan

The road is life. Jack Kerouac

Countdown To Christmas (14): Flight

It's coming on Christmas
They're cutting down trees
They're putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on...

Joni Mitchell: River

Greedy people take what's mine
I can leave them all behind
And they can never cross that line
When I get to the border

Saw-bones standin' at the door
Waiting till I hit the floor
He won't find me anymore
When I get to the border

Monday morning, Monday morning
Closing in on me
I'm packin' up and I'm a-runnin' away
To where nobody thinks of me

If you see a box of pine
With a name that looks like mine
Say I drowned in a barrel of wine
When I got to the border...

Richard Thompson: When I Get To The Border

But if you got to go,
It's all right.
But if you got to go, go now,
Or else you gotta stay all night...

Bob Dylan: If You Gotta Go, Go Now

Countdown To Christmas (15): Lost And Confused

I'm a rollin' stone all alone and lost
For a life of sin I have paid the cost
When I pass by all the people say
Just another guy on the lost highway...

Hank Williams: Lost Highway

I got mixed up confusion
Man, it's a-killin' me
Well, there's too many people
And they're all too hard to please

Well, my hat's in my hand
Babe, I'm walkin' down the line
An' I'm lookin' for a woman
Whose head's mixed up like mine

Well, my head's full of questions
My temp'rature's risin' fast
Well, I'm lookin' for some answers
But I don't know who to ask

But I'm walkin' and wonderin'
And my poor feet don't ever stop
Seein' my reflection
I'm hung over, hung down, hung up!

Bob Dylan: Mixed Up Confusion

Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse
An' for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Bob Dylan: Chimes Of Freedom

Countdown To Christmas (16): Guilt

Dixie Chicks: Not Ready To Make Nice

'If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.' Bob Dylan (and others)

'The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.' Victor Hugo

Countdown To Christmas (17): Separation

Bob Dylan: If You See Her, Say Hello

Another day. I follow another path,
Enter the leafing woodland, visit the spring
Or the rocks where the roses bloom
Or search from a look-out, but nowhere

Love are you to be seen in the light of day
And down the wind go the words of our once so
Beneficent conversation...

Your beloved face has gone beyond my sight,
The music of your life is dying away
Beyond my hearing and all the songs
That worked a miracle of peace once on

My heart, where are they now? It was long ago,
So long and the youth I was has aged nor is
Even the earth that smiled at me then
The same. Farewell. Live with that word always.

For the soul goes from me to return to you
Day after day and my eyes shed tears that they
Cannot look over to where you are
And see you clearly ever again.

Friedrich Hölderlin

Countdown To Christmas (18): Rejection

Lucinda Williams: If Wishes Were Horses

If I think of 'chicks with guitars' I think of Bonnie Raitt, Chrissie Hynde - and Lucinda Williams. I first started listening to Lucinda Williams in 1998 when her CD 'Car Wheels On A Gravel Road' came out. Her voice has been likened to whisky laced with gravel. Her laid-back, no bullshit, unsentimental style appeals to me. Quite simply, she rocks.

PS If you're not familiar with Lucinda Williams, you may know her song 'Passionate Kisses' - which Mary Chapin Carpenter made popular.

Countdown To Christmas (19): Darkness

I fought against the bottle
But I had to do it drunk
Took my diamond to the pawnshop
But that don’t make it junk...

Too late to fix another drink
The lights are going out
I’ll listen to the darkness sing
I know what that’s about...

Leonard Cohen: That Don't Make It Junk

Countdown To Christmas (20): Exile

I was just about nineteen
When I landed on their shore
With my eyes big as headlights
Like the thousands and thousands who came before
I was going to be something...

There's a crowd says I'm alright
Say they like my turn of phrase
Take me round to their parties
Like some dressed up monkey in a cage
And I play my accordion
Oh! but when the wine seeps through the facade
It's nothing but the same old story...

Paul Brady: Nothing But The Same Old Story

The Last House

My time in Scotland was nearly over. I had to get back for work by mid-August. So I hurried along the northern coast, edging from Sutherland into Caithness. Caithness, in the north-east corner of Scotland, rapidly became another of my favourite counties. Gradually I left the bare, isolated mountains of the far north-west and entered the flatter landscape of the Flow Country, Europe's largest blanket bog. Though much of the interior was desolate peatland, the cliffed coastline was constantly interesting. Along the coast and in shallow, sheltered valleys were square fields neatly dotted with big, round bales of freshly-cut hay. I passed grey and black, turreted castles guarding bleak, windswept settlements.

I skirted the nuclear power plant at Dounreay, looked down over Scrabster harbour (a ferry sails from here to the Orkney Islands), then stopped for a while in the tidy little sea-town of Thurso. This whole area was colonised by the Vikings, and Scandinavian influence still remains strong today. I spent a couple of absorbing hours in Thurso's brilliant new museum, Caithness Horizons, housed in the old Town Hall and Library building. On the ground floor you can see the Skinnet and Ulbster standing stones with their mysterious Pictish carvings; and on an upper floor there's a fascinating display dedicated to local geologist and botanist, Robert Dick.

Just east of Thurso, and beyond Dunnet Bay, stands the lighthouse at Dunnet Head, the most northely point of the Scottish mainland (see top pic). From here you can gaze out across the Pentland Firth at the Orkney Isles. You can identify quite clearly the Old Man Of Hoy (the famous rock stack much beloved of climbers) just off Hoy, Orkney's south-westerly island; and the entrance to Scapa Flow, that great natural harbour used by the Vikings more than a thousand years ago and more recently by British fleets during both World Wars.

It's not much further to John o' Groats, journey's end for most tourists and coach trippers, with its cafés, fast food stalls and souvenir shops, and its Last House in Scotland...

It's much more rewarding to make your way out to wildly beautiful Duncansby Head, just a few miles north-east of John o' Groats. From the cliff-top path you can approach nesting fulmars, their nests perched precariously on near-vertical cliff faces; the chicks, seeming almost bigger than their parents, were huge, grey-white balls of fluffy down. In some of the rocky bays seals trod water, basking - heads up - in the sun. Kittiwakes shrieked, gannets dived, and a small raft of 8 eider ducks floated close to shore.

These are the striking, needle-pointed sea stacks at Duncansby...

Odd One Out: Hasty Conclusion

Oh, heck! If I carry on like this, with such a slow reveal, then it'll take until the end of next week! And I haven't got a lot of time, so...

3. True. But Keith Emerson never needed to worry. This was in the mid-1990s; a local band called Spitfire McGuire, quite big in North Notts for, well, a few months; had to quit 'cos I was finding it hard to get up for work on Monday mornings...

4. True. Durham Uni. Mid-1970s. Final year. Final day of final year. Traditional end of year show by non-returning undergraduates, soon to be graduates. Satirical verses read by yours truly on shiny toilet roll which unrolled more and more rapidly with each scabrous stanza...

5. True. Difficult now to recapture my state of mind at the time... But it's been lightly documented already on this blog...

6. True. The airport at Palma, Majorca, in the mid-1990s. The Ryanair queue. Surprisingly, Helen Mirren and Taylor Hackford, her film director partner and soon-to-be husband, were travelling bucket-shop. We recognized them. No one else did. Hackford scowled many times in our direction. Just leave us alone! Keep your eyes elsewhere! Mmm, my eyes may have strayed elsewhere, but the tips of my fingers evidently did not...

7. True. Publishing sales conference, Linda Barker, celebrity author, etc, etc.

8. True. Everyone seems to have passed their driving test 1st time round here... Course it was easier back then - when there was no written test...

9. FALSE!!! To those who thought otherwise... How could you? I mean, who do you think I am!!! Besides, my wife reads this rubbish. And she's the only one (the only wife, I mean...)

10. True. It's publishing again, celebrity author Michael Winner invites us to his posh house, champagne and another champagne (but not a 3rd, he's not that generous)... yawn... yawn...

11. True. Frankie Howerd. Pebble Mill At One. The BBC studios. I'm a shy and callow youth, alone with Frankie in his dressing room. Now, help me dear, shall I wear the pink shirt or the purple one? What a decision? I ask you? I help him choose. I couldn't help noticing that both shirt collars are dirty.

12. True. A CAMRA Real Ale 'Conference' at Aston University (I kid you not) in the 1970s. No one else from the book distributors would go - they were all ill or having babies or otherwise engaged, funnily enough - so it was left to me, the shy and callow greenhorn recruit. Luckily the audience was sparse, and mainly worse for wear. And there were some large, real-ale ladies there with suckling infants - honest! Fair put me off my regurgitated statistics.

Julie Driscoll: This Wheel's On Fire