'Five Years'

I cried last night watching this BBC Two documentary 'Five Years', which focuses on five key years of David Bowie's work. I loved most of his seventies' stuff, the later music less so. I also loved the clips - 1 hour 9 minutes into the programme - of him playing John Merrick in The Elephant Man, with exquisite vulnerability and beautiful ugliness.

I had not followed Bowie's music for a long time but there was a time when he was all I listened to, in my teens and twenties (alongside Leonard Cohen and Frank Zappa). The outpouring of sadness on social media is, of course, not just the passing of an extraordinary and unique artist - aged only 69 - but the mourning of our own Bowie-wrapped memories (and that wrapping has beautiful, silver bows).

But now a shift has taken place and our memories are, in a way, suddenly hollow. 

I had all of his albums, my cousin and I exchanged 'Heroes' and 'Space Oddity' as Christmas gifts one year, I don't remember who gave what, but he was so physically beautiful on both covers. I remember how the 'Diamond Dogs' cover folded out. It was sumptuous. And how I could never get into  'Lodger', I'd play it over and over, hoping to like it more, but having to admit to myself I didn't...

I remember seeing the German film Christiane F. at a Glasgow cinema (no longer there), mesmerised by the Bowie soundtrack. The boyfriend I went with died many years ago from a brain haemorrhage,  I don't know the circumstances, we had lost touch, but I remember what I wore to the cinema that night, a long red cotton Indian print dress.

(I also remember the pink trousers I wore, dancing to 'John I'm Only Dancing' in the QM Union.)

I don't have a favourite track, it's almost impossible to choose one, but the song that always pierces me is 'Five Years' and it is in my novel. When I was told by a consultant neurologist in 1984 - almost eighteen months after becoming ill with Coxsackie virus - that I had myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and it could last for five years, I was horrified and truly didn't know how I could bear feeling so  ill for another five years. I was twenty years old. My character Helen Fleet says:

On the way home in the car, I hoped we’d crash and that I’d be killed instantly and Rita would walk away without a scratch. I kept thinking of the David Bowie song ‘Five Years’: . . . five years left to cry in . . . steady drums, louder and louder and louder . . . five years, stuck on my eyes, high violiny bit. (The State of Me, Chapter Five)

It's hard, I think,  to describe Bowie without resorting to dreadful clichés - all I can say is I have a lump in my throat and even writing this I have tears. Yesterday, I realised how much of a part he had played in my growing up. When I hear the tinkling at the beginning of 'Ashes to Ashes', I am back in my childhood living room in 1980, aged sixteen, not yet ill, watching Top of the Pops. At New Year, I tweeted this, it feels a bit dislocating now. 

The Appa Dance (made us happy as carpets)

We had much hilarity with MadLibs over the holidays. My eleven year old nephew introduced us to the game. You're asked for adjectives, adverbs, nouns, names and places, but only the questioner knows the title of the story. A narrative emerges, flash fiction, nonsensical and surreal. Appa is my nephews' nickname for me, sometimes they will call me Appa instead of Auntie Nasim. (My brothers and I had a very old aunt in Pakistan when we visited in the seventies, we knew her as Auntie Appa, we did not know then that 'apa' was Urdu for elder sister, we thought Appa (two 'p's) was her name.

The Latest Dance Craze

Have you heard about the latest dance craze sweeping Paris? It's called The Appa! Slip on your hunting shoes, turn up the speakers on your Christmas tree and let's master the moves that put this bleak dance on the map: put your hands on your shins, stomp your nose and strike a sad pose. Take fourteen colourful steps to the left, spin irresponsibly, then take two boisterous steps to the right. Throw your mouth in the air and sway your foxes from side to side. For the big finish, stick out your belly button and wiggle it excitedly. Repeat all of these circular steps until the song is over.

It reminded me of The Time Warp in Rocky Horror. In the early eighties, we spent many a happy night as students in the cinema, doing all the actions. In another Madlibs,  'happy as carpets' came up. I want to use that gorgeous phrase in a story.

*Update I received this photo on Twitter of the 'happiest carpets I know', stunning image of dyed rugs drying in Tangiers:

Carlos Acosta on BBC4

With television so dumbed down and dispiriting, was a joy to come across Carlos Acosta on Boxing Day night. My favourite dance was this piece, 'Derrumbe', about a marriage ending. The female dancer is Pieter Symonds. She is mesmerising. The music is spellbinding too. The whole BBC4 programme is available here for a while.