Guitars and stars

It’s a miscellany. Listen carefully.

I dug out my Danelectro from behind the bed board last night, found a toy amplifier supermum gave me for my birthday last November (I’m a Scorpio, fact fans) and tried out the new guitar tuner on my iPhone. I worked out the chords for Joe Jackson’s “It’s Different For Girls” for the first time. It rocks on single coil pick-ups through a speaker with a diameter of two inches.

Dudelet came in to watch.

“You’re playing air guitar!”

“Ah, not quite.”

“You are! Just like a real rock star…”

“Oh. Yes. I suppose so.”

He wandered off with my iPhone (no doubt making a mental note to investigate the guitar further at a later date) and I dug into “Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere.” Then back to the Joe Jackson song.

I really must grab the lyrics from somewhere.

When I grow up, I want to be an 8x12 Marshall Stack.

◊ ◊ ◊

Earlier today, I finished Diana Wynne Jones’ The Game. It’s a comparatively short but densely imagined book that gives no quarter in its demand that you immerse yourself in the world of its central character, and her unusual family. It finishes abruptly, seemingly with much left to be said. Perhaps she just needed to get on with the next book. We can, after all, perfectly well fill in what happens next ourselves if we want to. What happened before, we needed Wynne Jones for.

Neil Gaiman calls her the best writer of magic there is. He’s right. She’s also provided me with a model of what I’d like to be in my own writing  – a lightness, a firm but contingent moral compass and the capacity of, perhaps,  the blue guitar “to see things as they are.”

♥ ♥ ♥

Much later that night.

“You may bang your head against that board if you stay where you are.”

“I may quite like the idea.”

• • •

At work, I have a desk. It was shot in India, in 1969. I don’t know how the CDs all got there. Those pesky wormholes.