Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime

Even Sarah Ferguson

Hello Dear Reader

Do you believe in signs? I do. The last few weeks have been full of signs for me and when I read with great interest this week that Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of Toe Sucking, thinks the late Queen is talking to her on a daily basis through her surviving corgis, I knew I was tapped into the greater consciousness.

Let me back up a little. I had planned to do a version of The Cranberries’ Linger, and started it in good faith. It quickly became apparent I was ruining it. I soldiered on, determined, and like a good little worker bee wanted to get it off my desk before I made a quick jaunt to the Languedoc for my husband’s birthday weekend. The more I tried, the more I made a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. It will now languish on my hard drive for the foreseeable and I apologise, people of Limerick, but it is for the best. Far from enticing you to buy the remaining tickets to my show on November 14th, it would probably put you off me for life.

While abroad - and France really is abroad these days what with passport control for Brits entering the EU akin to North Korean border control - standing on the terrace of Villa Bethania in Rennes-le-Château and looking out across at the Pyrenees and beyond, I was reminded that in the great scheme of things, humans alive today are no more than tiny ants astride the colony of time. We have been fighting over the same things, attempting to unravel the same mysteries of God and Power since the dawn of time, and we show no signs of stopping soon. I don’t know if it even matters anymore. I am at the point where I wonder if everything is, indeed, fated - even our supposed free will - and we are just unwitting actors doomed to play parts we neither asked for nor understand.

On a lighter note, I realised nobody’s life would be any the poorer for missing out on me murdering The Cranberries.

I had this lovely story about it for you too, about how it was my go-to song when I was getting over my first love and all that. And the song I have chosen for this week has no story attached. I can’t remember when I first heard it - it was just always there, part of my musical furniture. It doesn’t get played on the radio as much as it used to these days, but it is prime, late-night back of a taxicab with Magic FM on the radio.

Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime was The Korgis only real hit - something I can relate to - and bits of it were quite likely recorded in a bathroom, in Bath. A Bath bathroom if you will. (I’m here all day.) Thus, with a little bit of mileage gerrymandering, it’s the qualifying song for my Corsham show.

Recording it was like falling off a log, and it has been pure joy to make this cover for you. It’s both a simple and complex song with gorgeous chords - love a diminished, I do - but only one verse lyric that gets repeated in both verses, and a one line lyric for the chorus. And yet this song manages to do so much, to be so evocative, with so little.

It is a lesson in restraint.

No pun intended, but I have been learning so much in this process. Definitely with regards to musicianship, but more importantly, it is teaching me that I can surrender to loving what I love because I love it, instinctively. That I am too old to give a toss about what is cool and what is not. That we should not choose things because of what we want others to think about us - because guess what? - other people are not thinking about us nearly as much as we think they are. Life becomes much simpler when we stop giving a shit.

And what do I love? I love that sweet spot of pop music made between the mid 1960s and the late 1980s. Occasionally, things from more recently will resonate with me but by and large, for some reason I most love the music that was made before I was born or when I was a small child. Maybe I am not alone. Maybe a psychologist can come along to explain this. (Any psychologists reading could you please also explain why I have a pathological urge to sing Knutsford City Limits! at the top of my lungs any time I drive past the services on the M6.)

Before I bid you adieu, Fergie if you’re reading, I’ve been giving your corgi predicament some considerable thought since first I learned of it, and while one hates to bring reality to bear on our more esoteric experiences, as a dog owner of many years, might I humbly suggest that those dogs aren’t bearing a message from the Queen beyond the grave.

What I think they’re trying to tell you is ‘FEED ME, BITCH.’

With love as ever,

Nerina xxx