Mother

The longest wait, in a chair on the landing of the stairwell. I have nothing to keep me occupied. The hospital is quiet, it is the middle of the afternoon.

My little sister is ill again. We are visiting her in a London hospital. We came by train and bus which was the best part of all of this. I liked the movement and the view. My mother and I sat on the top deck of the bus, at the front so we could see everything in the streets.

This time I am not allowed to see Helen; I am too young, or only one visitor is allowed, or she is too ill, I don't really know. I don't ask any questions. The ugly lady in blue with a white hat is really quite nasty to my mother and won't let me see my sister; I don't care. I pretend not to care anyway. I have been the centre of attention and now I have to be out of the way, while my mother visits. She takes the gift she had bought for me to bring and the signed get-well card. The card says, "Get Well Soon, but don't be a Pig" on the outside and "Because when he's cured, he's dead!" on the inside. There is a picture of a fat pink pig on the front. I have no idea what it means, except that my mother thinks it's funny. I am placed out of sight, outside the swing doors. Someone finds a chair.

The chair is big and hard. My feet don't touch the floor. I am good. I don't wander off. No-one comes by. When I move the chair and it scrapes the floor I can hear echoes from both up and down, it seems. The stairs are made of hard white marble veined with grey swirls. The walls are white. There are polished brass handrails on each side of the stairs with curly horns at the ends. The centre rail is continuous. If I lean over and look down it goes round and round and round.

The stairwell has high, bare windows; one for each floor, but the lower part of the window glass is frosted – there's no view, even when I stand on the chair. I rock the chair and it nearly tips. I sit down again.

There is a distant noise of footsteps and some people talking, and then it stops. Everything is so quiet. I am not used to silence. There is no sound even from the city traffic. There had been a big sign on the street as we walked from the bus stop, "Keep Quiet - Hospital." I am never quiet and that is obviously a bad thing around here.

Eventually my mother comes out and I hold her hand as we go down the stairs. It has been a very long time, and perhaps she is upset. I don't ask about my sister. I have my mother to myself again.

Music

I am not going to pretend to know much about music, although it has undeniable power and influence. I have myself been moved to tears of joy or rage - a beautiful song at a funeral  - or muzak in a stuck elevator.

At school at ten years old, I had music lessons via a regular radio program with an accompanying book of lyrics and stories about the songs. That was multi-media for the sixties! Thirty of us sang a large variety of folk songs, so-called “Negro” spirituals, and sea-shanties from around the world. In later years, I was to find out that the lyrics had been cleaned up quite a bit – I suppose that references to the ladies of the night in English seaport towns was a bit shocking to teachers even in those swinging times.

Other musical experiences were at the daily religious service. All English state schools were, by definition, Anglican and had daily prayers and hymns. Later on, I joined the school choir. Hymns, ancient and modern, Christmas carols. I can't say I hated it - until I learned the error of my ways.

This revelation came with my adolescent realization that the music I had experienced thus far was crap. I blamed the government. At this time there were only three radio stations in Britain. The BBC had a monopoly on radio broadcasting, for reasons to do with the National well-being. The Home Service had news, serious talk and drama. The Light Programme, old-people's popular music, some good comedy, some soap operas. The Third Programme featured classical music. Music that was actually popular with the under-thirties didn't get played at all. This was 1967.

Little did I know that the recording industry or copyright reasons enforced a legal limit of a total of only five hours recorded music daily on the BBC, for fear that it would cut into sales of records. The Beatles had become practically has-beens by the time they were heard on the BBC (we may think of their music as a bit pedestrian now, indeed I have heard it in elevators, but then it was characterized as “not what the public wanted”).

As a young child, listening to the music on the radio was alright, quite jolly really. Sometimes uplifting sometimes hummable. However, at thirteen I learned that the BBC was a tool of the capitalist repression of...whatever it was that was being repressed. I decided that it was soft, wet, lying and hateful. I rebelled. I started listening to Pirate Radio! I lived in the south-east corner of England from where one could hear the broadcasts of Radio Luxembourg, and from the “pirate” ships, Radio Caroline and Wonderful Radio London.

The music was new, fun and exciting. The disc-jockeys were American sounding and irreverent. They had interesting sound effects, jingles and, yes, advertising! Good heavens! Nothing so exciting on the BBC! 

I bought several really bad record albums based on a single hearing of a single song. So much for advertising. Funnily enough, hearing new music on the radio actually made people go out and buy records! The recording industry was in turn shocked and appalled and quietly banking the proceeds.

Now I wasn't a complete fool. It was illegal to listen to unlicensed and unauthorized radio stations. I planned this law-breaking step very carefully. I decided to listen but, I would only do it in the bath, where I thought that I and my little battery-powered transistor radio might escape detection by Big Brother. The signals were really barely audible even with an earpiece. I felt like a wartime spy in enemy country. My family were puzzled and annoyed that I spent so much time locked in the bathroom. I expect that they thought I was smoking.

Eventually, the BBC fought back against my campaign of terror. They opened a fourth radio station that was called, rather oddly, Radio One. They hired a few middle-aged disc-jockeys and they had strong, stable signals. No teenaged hipsters like me were fooled. The smarmy, smiling faces of the “housewives' friends” were all over the the “Radio Times”, a publication that I eschewed. Although as the official organ of the BBC which carried the exclusive weekly listing of all forthcoming programming on the 2 TV stations and 4 radio channels, I also frantically consulted it when it was delivered each week.

Further salvos came from the British government which pushed to prosecute the advertisers who supported the pirate stations and they gradually went out of business (thus fulfilling my paranoid view of a nanny state that suppressed all the fun.)

In reality it wasn't the BBC that was a tool of the capitalists. Music had become a commodity with vast profits, to be bought and sold, together with the audience. The model had been set in the United States and the pressure was mounting to cater to, and to fleece, the large and growing "Baby Boomer" population. Over the next few years pressure to sell music by radio broadcast had become enormous. People were being bribed, or demanding bribes, to promote music. By 1973, independent private radio stations were permitted and they followed the old pirate radio formula. Some of the hosts were former pirates. It was all fun, laughs and advertising.

Since then, popular music as fashion has seen wave after wave of rebellion, consolidation, stagnation and rebellion once more. It's interesting to think back and realize how my tastes were manipulated into liking things that were derivative, stolen, silly and actually pretty bad. The radio stations of today are like the fossilized remains of these eras. We now have a large number of formulaic commercial radio stations each of which contains the exact flavour of music that will appeal to a particular age group with the advertising to match. These are mass produced by a California company called Clear Channel. I look forward to the “Classic Rock” station that features advertizing for incontinence products for seniors and retirement homes.

And for today's thirteen-year-olds, the rebellion of Pirate Radio is on the high seas of the Internet. The music continues.

Pets

A pet is often defined as a non-human companion although humans can be pets too. The word implies a subordinate being doted upon by the pet owner. Most of us think of animals when we think of pets.

There is an enormous kaleidoscope of behaviours around this topic. People are usually very devoted to their pets, sometimes beyond death – I was astonished to find my brother-in-law has his late dog's ashes in an urn on a specially built shelf at the turn of his stairwell. This is years after the dog died. It seems so...unbalanced. Every time one goes up and down the stairs of his house, there she is. Perhaps I'd have felt it a bit more normal if there had been a picture of the dog there. However, the portrait, there is no other word for it, is an enormous oil painting-like photo set in a gilt frame over his fireplace.

There are a lot of funerary practices for beloved pets that are considered quite sensible – burying the dear departed at the end of the backyard is one. I think this is reasonable although it can be exhausting what with the fits of weeping and the damage to the lawn. Paying the vet to have the remains cremated is another for the more fastidious and less athletic. Buying a plot in an actual pet cemetery, where vast green lawns are dotted with full-sized statues of sleeping animals, seems a bit excessive. Worse still, one may be buried in such a cemetery, provided one is first cremated. This isn't much different from the Ancient Egyptians who mummified their cats, presumably to meet them again in the afterlife. Millions and millions of mummified cats. Of course, this did happen over the course of more than a thousand years so they had quite a while to accumulate.

At the other end of life is the expression of our love in the form of food. Mealtimes for cats and dogs are sometimes as fraught as those of small children. The pet owner (or the staff as my cat appears to believe) provides that adorable tiny tin of Duck and Wild Rice, or Cod, Sole and Shrimp – opens it, mixes it, just so, with a drop of warm water, and then is stunned by its almost instant rejection. 

“What? You liked this the other day! What have I done? What can I do?” 

Our hunt for ever more exotic and increasingly expensive delicacies to appeal to the feline palate is on-going. I have it on good authority that other pets like hamsters, gerbils and rabbits are not so particular.

Someone has made a shortfilm, in the style of the French existential cinema, black and white with a deep male voiceover and subtitles – it's called “Henri – le Chat.” In this, the tormented soul of an indoor cat ponders his fate – he is doomed to live a life where his Whitefish and Tuna is starting to taste the same as his Turkey and Giblets. It's all very sad. The difficulties in getting good staff are manifest.

There are more difficult cases. I have a friend who spoils her cats. She got a new kitten a couple of years ago, a very pretty tabby with unusually wide black stripes. It grew up into a beautiful young cat. And then it got bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Not in height, but in girth. It is now has the dimensions of an enormous furry beach ball. I presume this is not entirely the cat's fault. We love our pets to death.

What do I want to say about pets? I thought about saying they are useful in reminding us about Life and our humanity and the natural world, but it's really about love.

We need to love and we need to be needed, even if it is only by an ungrateful pet at mealtimes.