Well, my day today has indeed been “enjoyably free of grief”, but I didn’t end up laughing through the two minutes silence.
My original plan had been to play the Sex Pistols version of God Save The Queen when the peasantry went silent, but that didn’t happen because of…well…family really. But something good happened instead, so I’m not complaining.
From listening to Radio 3 (the only media outlet musically literate enough to notice) I knew the music planned for the Westminster Abbey church service. It occurred to me that watching and listening could be a way to break through Dad’s Alzheimer haze and actually hold conversations with him. Because music reaches where other stimuli do not, especially to a musician with a lifelong involvement in brass, military and church music.
So I put my republican cynicism aside and tried it. I’ve just been up to his care home, where we watched the church service together on TV, with me pointing out the composers (Judith Weir, Vaughan Williams, James Macmillan, Hubert Parry……) as the pieces came up and telling Dad which were being heard for the first time or reminding him which had been played or composed for other royal events.
We listened carefully, marvelling at the sound, applauding when each piece went right, wincing at bum notes (noticed at least a couple) and laughing at the thought of what military bandmasters will say to the culprits tonight. We had long and detailed conversations about music in general.
Dad no longer has enough of an attention span to read music, or even a paragraph in a book. If he doesn’t have the song embedded in his long term memory he cannot play it, and the bit of his brain that recognizes this failure torments him.
Also because of the galloping dementia he loses track of time or what day it is, so cannot, say, put on the TV at a certain channel, day or time to see a Proms concert. But he can still appreciate good music or criticize bad if someone is there to see and hear it with him. I did that today and had what is a rare experience for me too, long conversations about music with someone else who knows about it.
So, I should at least thank the Windsor woman for facilitating that experience. Shame she had to pop her clogs for it to happen, but in my lifetime she gave me nothing else, while living off my and everybody else’s labour. Hardly a fair economic exchange, but with a world run by idiots you take the little you can get.
Manx Low Life 