One day in the run-up to my 50th birthday, when they knew I was going to be out for several hours, R and the Offspring made a recording of Bill Withers’ Lean on Me and mixed it on this little deck. When a CD of the recording appeared on the birthday breakfast table I was astonished, and somewhat overwhelmed – not least because both Offspring had been in car crash a couple of days earlier, after L’s car hit black ice, from which they’d emerged with barely a scratch between them, while the car, having flown over a hedge and bounced on its roof before rolling across a field, was completely written off. So as you’d expect, I was in a pretty fragile emotional state that morning, even before they hit me with Lean on Me.
R is currently in the process of stripping all the old recordings off this machine before giving it away, but first he’s remixing Lean on Me, to remove a drum track and make it a little less 2007, and this morning he let the Boy Wonder hear it and use the faders to take the various elements and voices up and down in the mix. B was very intrigued by this, and especially interested to hear his Mummy singing, but found the whole thing a little discombobulating. Unsurprisingly, I suppose – it’s not as if we’re born knowing that songs are recorded in bits and assembled afterwards. Once R has finished the remix, I’ll add the finished piece to the child-appropriate playlist I use when B’s travelling in my car, on which there are some tracks he loves so much that we sometimes have to hear them on repeat for an entire journey (I used to love Another Saturday Night, but now – not quite so much), and it will be interesting to see if this makes the cut and joins his pantheon of favourite songs.
Having neatly filled the after-breakfast hiatus with a new experience for the Boy, we than went out at his request to repeat one that’s on the way to becoming a tradition, which was a trip on the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Steam Railway, from Broadway to Winchcombe and back. Should you do this trip yourself, on a day when the northbound train sets off from Winchcombe just two minutes after the southbound one arrives, I must advise you that getting up and over the footbridge that spans the tracks within that timeframe is not made any easier when you have a slightly argumentative five-year old in tow. Luckily R, anticipating this, had scuttled across before us so that if necessary he could sweet-talk the station master into holding the train, and the man’s demeanour went from irritated to sympathetic when he saw us carefully descending the steep steps to the platform. I think they went faster than usual on the way back to Broadway though, so as to make up the time.
Back at home I made hot dogs for lunch (“YAY!! Hot dogs! I LOVE them!”), followed by some more of yesterday’s home-made ice cream for the menfolk. And then it was time to set off for Monmouth, where we met up with L and handed back a very tired Boy. Our task for the weekend completed, we meandered back home and spent the evening sitting in a heap, gently marinating in red wine.
R: L2, C10, D17.
