I'd never been to a punk gig before, just like there are a lot of things I've never done before. There's an advantage to having spent my youthful years wrapped up in church being told what I could and couldn’t do / say / think. There’s so much I like yet to discover. Hallelujah!
Sixty was the new sixteen in that night club among a diverse age-group of parents and teenagers: people living and reliving their youths. And even better, the day before I got to walk with Suzanne on the beach. We spent the afternoon in Aberdyfi in the clear November sunshine. It was the perfect, peaceful preparation...
... for the noise of it! The exultant, white, brash, crashing, strident, energetic noise of drums and bass and guitar and that voice (what a voice!) calling out the patriarchy, misogyny, injustice, racism, homophobia ... and there was tenderness too, and joy, and hurt and crowd-surfing and an enormous mosh pit, and all of it LOUD and PASSIONATE and UNAPOLOGETIC!
It's the un-apology that mesmerised me. And when I opened my birthday card from my younger son yesterday, he framed the thought for me in a way I could apply to my day: Have a lovely day Mum, “doing what you damn well please!” Something about his turn of phrase, the love expressed, opened up my birthday to me in that moment. I'd planned, for example, to postpone my present-opening till the evening when his big brother would be home. "But I please to know what my presents are now!" I thought, so I damn well opened my presents over breakfast, and I'm so glad I did, and I knew my sons would be too. What I found was that there are people who clearly know and care about me. So much thoughtfulness in the givings. It made me very damn pleased.
I’d already planned to take the train (I damn well like trains) with my friend Paul (a damn good fellow) to Aberdyfi (thank you for the reminder, Suzanne, that Aberdyfi pleases me). Before boarding, I had damn pleasing coffee and a bacon roll at Shrewsbury Coffeehouse. I took pens and paper on the train and we did some damn writing and drawing. (My drawing has all the characteristics of someone who damn well doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. Paul's is sophisticated, funny and elegant).
In Aberdyfi, I got in the pleasing sea. Damn! It was invigorating! I got wet up to my neck by lying down in it as it too damn dangerous to go in deep. I pleased myself, eating fish and chips and bara brith, bought a set of chalks, and ginger beer. Paul ate fish and chips and bara brith too, so I think he was damn well pleasing himself, but that's for him to say. The trains ran through storm Bram unapologetically as pretty much on time as they cared to be.
At the Lambrini Girls gig, I couldn't take my eyes off mic-brandishing Lunny and her embodied fury, intellect, and too-small-shirt/bare-midriff-fragility. To be so certainly herself - how does she do that, I wondered. How to care and not to care? I'm damn pleased I learned more about that on yesterday's journey.
Happy damn pleasing train-swim-fish&chip days to all of us: girls, women, others, Lambrini or not. May there by many happy, damn pleasing, returns.
