music here and there...

It’s been ages since I last wrote about anything on my wee blog. I was going to do a ‘this’s been happening and that’s been happening’ kind of spiel, but too much’s been happening for that! So, I’ll just go back to basics and tell you one of the things that made me feel good today.

I’ve been a bit down in the dumps over these past few days and a bit weepy. Ocht, it’s just not like me and I’ve been trying so hard to shake it off! There’s a reason for me feeling a bit upset, but it’s not something I feel comfortable about sharing, so I'll just keep that part of the story to myself. I’ve not been a total misery guts and, as ever, I’ve been finding plenty of things in my days to make me feel good: spending time with Gemma while she was home over the weekend; learning interesting stuff at Uni yesterday and getting the go-ahead to start my placement work with clients (woohoo!); demolishing a bottle of wine on Monday night and enjoying lots of boozy chit-chat with Alex (I’d been looking forward to a good ‘get-it-out-your-system-sing-song’ but choir practice was cancelled and I was left with no option but to hit the bottle instead...!); enjoying a nice lunch with a good friend; watching Gordon perform on stage with a fantastic vocal group made up of pupils from our local schools; and finding out that I’m not the only middle aged wifey who suffers from a freezing cold nose......

OK, so that last one sounds a bit weird – let me just quickly explain! My nose gets really cold, and I mean really cold. Poor Alex’s had to put up with me going on about it, and getting him to feel how cold my nose is, day in, day out, “Feel it! It’s absolutely freezing, isn’t it?!” Even when the rest of my body is nice and toasty, my nose can be sooo cold. And it gets sore too; it’s so cold sometimes it’s actually quite painful. Stop laughing – it’s not funny! Gemma thought it was funny too, but she humoured me by typing ‘freezing cold nose’ into Google and, low and behold, came across one of these forum thingies with a thread full of posts from women all over the world bemoaning the fact that their nose was always freezing. Even better, they’re all in their 40’s or 50’s and they’re all either menopausal or, like me, have had a hysterectomy in recent years! There’s a whole community out there of wifeys with freezing cold noses! It’s a syndrome waiting to be discovered! I didn’t go so far as joining the forum; these women were taking it all a bit too serious for my liking (“it almost broke up my marriage, my husband just doesn’t understand how debilitating it is...”) but I did take some comfort from the fact that I wasn’t imagining the fact that my nose was sometimes unnaturally cold!

Anyway, as I was saying, I’ve been feeling a bit rubbishy over the past few days but it’s definitely not all been bad and today was no different. After spending the morning catching up on work work, Alex and I headed off to the funeral of someone who’s been a close friend of Alex’s family for many years. Jessie was 92 when she died and had only become more dependent on others during the past couple of years. It was a ‘nice’ funeral, and we came away with a real sense of Jessie having had a lovely, and fitting, send off. Much of that was down to the minister who conducted the service. She was quite theatrical and had a beautiful, operatic singing voice - which thankfully drowned out the drones of those of us who aren’t at all religious and only know the most popular hymns in the book! She clearly knew Jessie well and had visited her many times in the nursing home – but she didn’t just go for a blether; she used to take her guitar in during her visits so that she could sing and play for all the residents. How lovely! I’ll bet the old ladies and gents got so much out of that; I’ve witnessed, on so many occasions, the uplifting effects of taking live music into the hospice and I don’t imagine it to be all that different in a Nursing Home!

It was so fitting that my friend Paul sent me a message tonight to tell me that he'd had another successful visit to Strathcarron earlier on today. I usually try to be at the hospice when folk come in to perform for - or play along with - the patients, but I was otherwise engaged at Jessie’s funeral when Paul visited today. However, I just love the fact that all the while that I was sitting listening to the minister telling us about the difference she’d made to elderly people’s lives by singing and playing guitar for them in their Nursing Home, one of my lovely Myriad of Music volunteers was actually making a difference to the lives of people who have life-limiting illness by singing and playing guitar for them in the hospice! 

And that was just the ticket to make me feel really good today!