In Good Company: Sturdy Little Shoots
...One way to throw off spring fever is to indulge in your favourite fantasy. Masculine daydreams usually flutter around the opposite sex but I suspect women would surprise their mates if they confided their inward desires. I must be a frustrated entertainer because all of mine are connected with applause – other peoples...
Enid Blackburn welcomes Spring by pounding away on the piano.
Despite the glacial conditions, sturdy little shoots in our garden are already pointing at the roof icicles. According to the calendar it should be spring. This heralds the stirrings of new life, etc, a favourite season for some.
But mine starts with summer, I mean Wordsworth’s everlasting sort, ‘Sweet childish days, that were as long as twenty days are now.’
I hated school and always associate summer with an eternal dawn to dusk freedom and the hot, sunbaked cornfields at the back of our house. This embryonic season not only starts the birds twittering early, we have our own built-in dawn chorus of ‘I’ve nothing to wear’ echoing above the perpetual record player at our house just now.
According to an article I’ve just read, we should all be experiencing a certain restless surplus of energy just now. I have a half-stripped bedroom waiting to do justice to just such a mood, but it hasn’t struck yet.
A lecturer in psychology, Dr J Nicholson, states that spring is the natural ‘flirting’ season, not only for the unattached, for he also believes marriages are improved by it. Partners become more attractive to each other, when they’ve had a flirtation with another.
I could see it drawing husband and me closer together - just close enough for him to club me with his spade or me to crown him with my frying pan.
The professor believed flirting to be a throwback to cave dwelling days. After a long hibernating winter, primitive Nog and his woman bounded from their hollow ripe for a round of socialising. It seems this feeling has lingered on.
Presumably this is when spring cleaning first evolved. Mrs Nog seeing the glint under her Noggy’s eyebrows starts making the first paintbrush, probably using Mrs Nextcave’s hair.
One way to throw off spring fever is to indulge in your favourite fantasy. Masculine daydreams usually flutter around the opposite sex but I suspect women would surprise their mates if they confided their inward desires. I must be a frustrated entertainer because all of mine are connected with applause – other peoples.
There I stand covered in spotlight exhausted but radiant after my com-pelling performance, smiling sympathetically as my audience goes berserk with adulation. Sometimes I work my fantasies out at the piano. I play ‘chopsticks’ as if I was Beethoven in the grip of his ‘fifth.’
Pounding up and down the ivories with my eyes shut, resting my nose on the keyboard occasionally like all best concert pianists. The people standing in the bus queue opposite our window must be fascinated.
To show my versatility I often jazz it up in my syncopating elbow flapping style, briskly plucking at the notes like a dog digging out a rabbit. Nodding my head furiously in a bouncy eight-to-the-bar finale. This technique has taken years to perfect. It looks most professional, but, thank God, no one can hear the racket that actually does emanate from my poor offended piano. At least it’s harmless, although for some reason it always sets the dog off scratching.
There is a certain male influence when I’m in my Saddler’s Wells mood, because I perform only with Nureyev.
Anyone who ever dreamed of being captured by a sheikh must have followed our Queen’s televised Arabian adventure with envy. Who can blame Her Majesty for being angry when Royal protocol forbids her to mingle with adoring Arabs who had been waiting in the hot sun for hours.
I wonder if Queens ever indulge in fantasies? Perhaps they dream of living in a semi opposite a bus stop, with a piano in the front room. Who knows?
