New Year new me? Not likely, I gave up making wildly outrageous resolutions like giving up chocolate & sweets for a month a long time ago and never ever have I attempted the dreaded dry January. Instead I have made compromises with myself such as giving up sweets/chocolate but just on weekdays – we’ll see how that goes this year shall we? What it will actually mean is that come Friday (cause Friday is essentially the weekend) I will begin a 3 day sugar worship. In fact on the 1st of January 2019 Brute said to me ‘New Years really only starts on the 2nd because everyone is hungover today, so we don’t need to give up chocolate until tomorrow’ I loved him more in that moment.
What I do actually genuinely want to ‘take up’ or resolve to do, is to give some time to me, ‘Me Time’ as it’s seemingly known, something that slowly over time has become less and less of a thing. It’s easy to unknowingly slightly lose the things that make you you over time and one thing that I could never lose but feel like I haven’t spent enough time nurturing is my great passion for music . Having studied and played my whole life I have found in recent years, particularly after having had children, that I listen to music less and less, probably compared to a lot of people I still listen to it a lot but I used to sit for hours and hours making playlists, listening to records, reading about musicians, going to concerts (small and big) and I miss it. Yesterday though I was in the kitchen and looking at this picture which is on the wall in our kitchen:
Each of these pictures was a table name at our wedding, afterwards we collected them up and made a collage of them. They are some of my absolute favourite artists and yesterday on the 1st day of the new year I was looking at it and decide to ask the ever (un)helpful Amazon Echo AKA Alexa to play me some Miles Davis on shuffle and after we had gotten past her not understanding, playing it in the wrong room and asking for the name again that lyrical trumpet came flowing through the speaker and It made me happy. I decided then that that was what I needed to start doing again, more things that make me happy. I also remembered that I wrote my dissertation on Miles Davis at Arts & Music School and got 97% which is pretty major, I’m allowed to brag because I was not a very scholarly or well behaved person at uni and was politely asked to leave shortly afterwards – Be good in school kids!
And so it is that “12 Months of Music” is born! It’s nothing really, just me telling myself that in each month of 2019 I’m going to take the time to listen to those great artists that I love and that make me feel happy and hopefully teach my children a thing or too.
My newest band members – I’m on piano in front of them 🙂
Right It’s time for me to get on, I have a double whammy super hero birthday bash to organise for next weekend, and currently the entertainer has gone AWOL and I have no back up – perhaps I shouldn’t have hassled them so much already…Ill look into that as something to work on for 2020…
REX & THE CITY 