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George Harrison leaves toddlers speechless.

Ten to six last Friday. It had rained all afternoon but it was still light behind the heavy cloud. I drove to the supermarket in Sorrento for milk, a can of peaches, a jar of dried basil, some Dargo walnut cheese and a light bulb to replace the ‘eco’ one in my reading lamp that had lasted two weeks before going fffft. By contrast, the ancient cobwebbed one in the porch light at the front door is an old Phillips 40 watt pearl that could be twenty years old. Or thirty.

The boys are lively at this time of day. They tear up and down like greyhounds, or scream or laugh, or just throw toys at each other in silence. It depends. They had been lively in the supermarket, but Coles has cleverly supplied a small number of special trolleys fitted with forward-facing twin dickey seats, fitted with four-point seatbelts. Tighten them nicely and the boys can be as vocal as they like. But they can’t move!

Back home along Point Nepean Road, snaking around the bay. To the left, the water was liquid silver under one enormous billowing cloud of gunmetal grey. 3RRR was on the car radio, just to compete with the noise from the back seat. Or drown it out. I braked gently and pointed the car into the Blairgowrie marina car park, high over the water, just to watch the setting sun turn the big cloud orange. On the radio, announcer Stephen Walker, a kind of self-styled Wolfman Jack known as the Ghost, was talking about the new Beatles re-release, marveling at the re-master quality. 3RRR goes MOR golden oldies. But he was right. The music is a revelation. As Walker said, you can just about walk through the layers of the songs. Then he played While My Guitar Gently Weeps and there was silence in the back seat.

The cloud was orange now, almost red. We drove home for dinner.

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I don’t know why nobody told you how to unfold your love

It looks like a slab of a sentence but in the song it unfolds like an opening spring flower.

Comments

  1. I love that song; why did all the radio stations only play the Beatles for a week or two after the re-release? Their music still stands up after all this time.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Neil, there was heavy rotation of the Beatles on Magic and Gold but I was pleasantly surprised to hear several Triple R announcers pick it up, notably the Ghost and Brian Wise on Off the Record.

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